UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT  LOS  ANGELES 


ANCESTRAL    VOICES 


ANCESTRAL  VOICES 


BY 

JOHN  A.  HUTTON,  D.D. 


;    V   ,    '•,•*  '.'     •,  ,  •*•'  •      ••*{!'  •••' 


NEW    XBJr     YORK 
GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 

[Printtd  in  Ortat  Britain,] 


AC^ 


W^l^ 


"  Priests 
Should  study  passion ;  how  else  cure  mankind* 
OS  Who  come  for  help  in  passionate  extremes?" 


■f^OQO 


x9o^ii» 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 

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http://www.archive.org/details/ancestralvoicesOOhuttiala 


TO    A 

DEAR    FRIEND 
F.    A.    A. 


«i 


PREFATORY    NOTE 

'T^HE  title  is  taken  from  a  line  in  Coleridge's 
-*-       Kubla  Khan,  and  itself  suggests  much  of 
what  lies  behind  this  volume  of  essays. 

Coleridge  wrote,  "Ancestral  voices  prophesying 
war."  The  thesis  underlying  these  essays  might 
be  put  in  this  way :  the  nature  of  man,  especially 
of  the  man  of  Western  civilisation,  has,  on  the 
whole,  taken  form.  There  is  in  him — the  fruit 
of  his  long  physical  and  historical  travail — an 
invincible  core  of  wisdom  and  final  prejudice, 
and  any  invasion  of  his  catholic  human  nature, 
man  as  an  individual  and  in  societies  inevitably 
rises  to  repel. 

The  book,  therefore,  may  help  serious  people 
to  perceive  that  what  we  are  beholding  in  this 
terrible  time  is  a  conflict  between  the  Ancestral 
Voices  of  the  soul  and  a  merely  rationalistic 
and    temporary   way   of   conceiving   man's   true 


X  PREFATORY  NOTE 

function  in  this  world ;  and  that  the  darkness 
which  is  meanwhile  over  the  world  is  the  protest 
of  man's  established  and  universal  nature  against 
a  proposed  sectional  tyranny. 

Ogscastle, 

Carnwath,  September  1915. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Prefatory  Note          .          .          .  ,  .  ix 

I.  The  Twentieth  Century— so  far  .  .  .  i 

II.  Is  AN  Age  of  Faith  returning?     .  .  ,  i8 

III.  The  Cry  for  Freedom — Nietzsche  ,  .  40 

IV.  The  Cry  for  Control— Tractarianism  .  .  71 

V.  Tertium     Quid  :     The     Message     of     G.     K. 

Chesterton  .  .  .  .  -95 

VI.  Five  Papers  on  "The  Sense  of  Sin  in  Great 
Literature  "— 

Introductory  .  .  ,  .  -131 

1.  "The  Rime  of  the  Ancient  Mariner"  .     141 

2.  "Peer  Gynt"  .158 

3.  "La  Morte"  .  .  ,  .  .178 

4.  The  Redemption  of  our  Solitude  (Dostoi- 

evsky, Tolstoy,  Shaw)      .  .  .     203 

5.  Here  and  There        ....    224 

VII.  Is   History   repeating    Itself? — "Julian    the 

Apostate  " :  a  Parallel       .  .  .    239 

Epilogue  .  .  .  .  .  ,  .262 


THE  TWENTIETH  CENTURY— SO  FAR 

'"T^O  write  just  now  about  the  twentieth 
X  century  is  as  unseasonable  a  task  as  it 
would  be  to  write  down  one's  impressions  of  a 
voyage  a  few  days  out  at  sea — wild  weather,  the 
ship  mounting  and  yawing,  and  oneself  so  mixed 
up  in  the  cosmical  business  as  not  to  be  very 
well. 

I  can,  however,  make  a  beginning,  in  the  only 
stable  region  that  is  left  to  us  meanwhile — 
the  region  of  my  memory.  I  can  recall  quite 
definitely  some  of  the  circumstances  of  my  own 
mind  in  the  months  immediately  preceding  the 
outbreak  of  war.  I  had  just  finished  reading  a 
book  by  Holbrook  Jackson,  entitled  The  Eighteen 
Nineties^  in  which,  whether  the  writer  intended 
such  an  inference  or  not,  one  was  permitted  to 
see,  in  the  light  of  certain  pathetic  and  terrible 
examples,  the   failure  and   inevitable   nausea   of 


2  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

naturalism  as  a  formula  for  life  or  for  art.  It 
was  like  the  reading  of  a  tragedy.  Those  young 
bloods  set  out  into  life,  one  and  all,  as  though 
there  were  no  laws,  no  nature  of  things ;  and 
one  by  one  they  ran  their  heads  against  one 
or  other  of  those  stone  walls  which  are  there — 
the  rude  precaution  of  society,  or  the  more 
delicate  embarrassment  of  God,  for  the  defence 
of  some  final  decency.  They  all  went  to  the 
Devil  or  returned  to  God ;  and  these  last,  with 
an  abjectness  and  confusion  of  the  soul  which, 
I  believe,  must  have  mixed  with  grief  God's  joy 
at  their  return.  One  went  mad,  one  died  in 
prison,  and  another  made  a  clutch  at  God  as 
he  was  slipping  out  of  life,  with  a  cry  as  much 
of  indignation  and  despair  as  of  faith.  "  I 
implore   you,"   wrote   Aubrey    Beardsley   on   his 

death-bed,    "to    destroy  all   copies   of  and 

bawdy  drawings.     Show  this  to  (naming  a 

friend),  and  conjure  him  to  do  same.  By  all 
that  is  holy,  all  obscene  drawings."  And  the 
words,  "in  my  death-agony,"  were  added  after 
his  signature. 

All  this,  coupled  with  a  similar  wave  of  reaction 
in  France,  and  anticipated  in  classical  statements 
in  the  profound   psychological  work  of  Tolstoy 


THE  TWENTIETH  CENTURY— SO  FAR      3 

— (all  this)  meant  for  me  that  there  is  a  way  by 
which  we  human  beings  must  go,  and  it  is,  on 
the  whole,  the  way  by  which  we  have  come. 
And  so,  eight  months  ago  my  working  formula 
for  the  Church  would  have  been,  that  we  should 
simply  sit  still,  that  we  should  be  watchful  and 
strengthen  the  things  which  remain,  that  we  should 
bide  our  time,  leaving  it  to  certain  invincible 
forces  working  subtilly  in  the  depths  of  men's 
souls,  to  lay  them  open  to  the  revenge  and 
indignation  of  something  deep  and  holy.  It 
seemed  to  me  then,  and  it  seems  to  me  still,  that 
the  churches  with  a  future  are  the  churches  with 
a  high  threshold ;  that  when  the  day  comes  for 
any  general  movement  towards  faith  amongst 
the  people,  they  will  be  attracted,  not  by  appeals 
which  are  easy  and  obvious,  but  by  appeals 
which  are  exacting  and  mysterious,  having  as 
little  as  possible  in  common  with  the  standards 
of  value  which  please  men  in  the  days  of  the 
flesh. 

Something  of  the  same  kind  cf  solution  of 
what  is  called  "  the  Social  Problem "  was  the 
best  I  had  to  offer  myself.  Every  thinking  man 
must  have  in  imagination  some  way  out  of  the 
troubles  which  are  threatening.      And  that  was 


4  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

my  way  out.  Having  spent  the  most  real  part 
of  my  own  life  amongst  the  poor, — not  so  much 
amongst  the  high-wage-earners,  who  are  re- 
markably disregardful  of  the  poor, — so  that  to 
this  day  I  can  speak  their  dialect  and  think  their 
thoughts,  I  know  how  they  resent  the  persistent 
effort  to  do  them  good  in  an  external  way,  and 
how  they  are  alienated  from  those  who  appear 
to  think  that  it  is  impossible  to  live  properly 
in  their  circumstances.  I  know  how  they  under- 
stand and  are  always  the  better  for  brotherliness 
and  love  and  a  common  laughter ;  how  they 
suspect  and  are  immediately  on  guard  against 
any  attempt  to  deal  with  them  in  the  name  of  a 
theory,  and  how  they  justify  themselves  in  ex- 
ploiting such  helpers  and  reformers. 

There  is  a  fine  passage  in  the  speech  of 
Dostoievsky  in  1881  at  Moscow,  at  the  unveiling 
of  a  memorial  to  Pushkin,  in  which  he  works  out 
my  idea ;  how  the  poor  say  to  us,  "If  you  will 
love  me,  you  must  love  mine  "  : — you  must  love 
the  things  I  love  :  you  must  come  to  me  in  the 
midst  of  these,  so  that  if  I  should  ever  leave 
them  for  other  conditions,  it  will  be  in  obedience 
to  some  new  desire ;  and  when  I  do  leave  them, 
it  will  be  with  respect  and  sorrow.     And  so,  for 


THE  TWENTIETH  CENTURY— SO  FAR      5 

myself,  I  have  never  lost  the  faith  that — to  put 
the  matter  in  an  illustration — one  day  a  voice 
will  break  out  at  a  mass  meeting  and  will  cry, 
"When  are  you  going  to  stop  speaking  to  us 
about  our  interests  ;  when  are  you  going  to  stop 
speaking  to  us  as  children,  or  rather  as  atheists 
or  machines  ?  When  are  you  so-called  leaders 
going  to  speak  to  us  in  the  name  of  something 
which  rebukes  us  ?  When  are  you  going  to 
speak  to  us  as  to  men  who  have  their  own  hours 
of  bad  conscience  and  secret  shame  ? " 

That  was  my  way  out :  that  here  and  there 
would  arise  out  of  the  masses  of  the  people 
humble  men  who  should  overthrow  the  present 
bitterness,  not  by  the  spirit  of  revolt,  but  by 
an  overflowing  and  intolerable  happiness  of  the 
soul.  The  entrance  of  "Russia"  will  contribute 
to  this. 

All  this  is  to  say  that  had  I  been  writing  last 
July  of  the  twentieth  century  from  the  point  of 
view  of  the  interest  of  serious  and  forecasting 
men,  I  should  have  set  myself  to  detect  and 
pursue  here  and  there  indications  of  a  spirit 
of  reaction,  of  fatigue,  of  caution,  of  wisdom, 
settling  down — in  the  first  instance — upon  guid- 
ing and  eminent   minds.     I    should   have   dwelt 


6  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

upon  that  as  a  sign  of  the  turn  of  the  tide  of 
naturalism,  as  the  confession  by  unprejudiced  ex- 
plorers that  out  there  in  the  darkness  things  are 
as  they  always  were,  that  the  deep  souls  in  all 
ages  were  right.  Indeed,  my  own  forecast  at  the 
time — and  it  may  be  that  later  events  have  made 
it  a  still  more  likely  one — was,  that  the  danger 
which  lay  ahead  of  us  was  not  the  danger  of  any 
general  movement  towards  atheism  or  denial,  but 
rather  of  a  movement  in  sensitive  and  religious 
spirits  towards  something  in  the  way  of  religion, 
outwardly  more  unanimous  and  undisturbed  and 
mysterious,  even  more  tyrannical  than  anything 
WE  exhibit,  who  in  a  day  of  darkness  may  seem 
to  souls  in  flight  to  be  ourselves  too  restless  and 
insecure.  What  I  foresaw  then  was  a  stampede, 
in  which  the  one  cry  should  be  for  shelter. 

All  that  was — before  the  Flood  :  and  yet  it 
may  very  well  be  that  this  break-down  of  civilisa- 
tion may  force  men  in  masses  to  the  very  con- 
clusions and  solutions  which  were  already  offering 
themselves  to,  we  might  even  say  tempting,  finer 
minds.  There  is  a  real  danger  that  intelligence 
in  matters  of  religion  may  for  a  long  time  be 
disparaged,  and  that  in  the  panic  over  the  alleged 
collapse   of  the   secular  reason    we   may   all    be 


THE  TWENTIETH  CENTURY— SO  FAR      7 

borne  beyond  a  proper  faith,  into  credulity  and 
superstition.  Such  an  anti-cyclone  in  the  general 
atmosphere  would  be  a  sinister  thing,  and  lead 
later  on  to  another  storm.  And  yet  something 
of  the  kind  will  almost  inevitably  happen :  there 
will  be  a  suspicion  of  mere  enlightenment,  and 
the  suspicion  once  aroused  may  go  to  all  lengths. 
It  will  be  for  convinced  and  manly  men  to  take  a 
firm  hold  of  the  situation,  and  to  deal  closely  and 
ruthlessly  with  the  misgivings  of  the  time, 
acknowledging  indeed  that  we  live  by  faith,  but 
protesting  at  the  same  time  that  we  live  by  a 
faith  which  stands  to  reason. 

There  is  a  charge  which  one  already  hears, 
which  we  shall  probably  hear  more  and  more — 
from  outsiders :  the  charge,  namely,  that  the 
present  break-down  is  a  reproach  to  Christianity  ; 
in  the  sense  that  it  is  due  to  the  failure  of  Christian- 
ity. We  must  at  once  secure  the  general  currency 
of  a  contradiction  to  such  a  charge.  It  ought  not 
to  be  difficult  to  let  the  masses  of  the  people  see 
that  this  break-down  in  civilisation  is  due  first  and 
last,  in  its  principles  and  in  its  processes,  to  the 
neglect,  and  indeed  to  the  explicit  repudiation, 
of  the  entire  body  of  ideas,  and  warnings,  and 
motives,    and   beliefs, — ideas   concerning    human 


8  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

nature,  and  the  nature  of  things — which  came 
into  the  conscience  of  the  world  with  Jesus,  a 
body  of  ideas  and  beliefs  for  the  obedience  to 
which  He  laid  down  His  life,  and  for  the  pro- 
pagation of  which  He  attached  some  men  to  His 
side  and  appealed  to  them  never  to  let  them 
die. 

The  present  collapse  of  civilisation,  the 
present  "failure  of  knowledge,"  may  on  the 
contrary  present  a  temptation  to  preachers  and 
teachers.  It  will  be  hard  for  us  to  resist  the 
inclination  to  say  "  I  told  you  so,"  and  not  to 
adopt  contemptuous  references  to  the  "so-called 
twentieth  century." 

And  yet  it  would  be  wrong  to  let  the  occasion 
pass  without  a  sober  and  persistent  claim  on  the 
part  of  the  Church  of  Christ,  that  the  whole 
tragedy  has  come  about,  first  and  last,  because  of 
the  neglect  or  denial  of  the  Christian  view  of  God 
and  the  world.  For,  whatever  more  we  are  to 
learn  from  this  eruption  of  natural  force  through 
the  heart  of  man,  which  is  raging  about  us  like 
a  sea  of  fire,  already  surely  we  have  learned  that 
we  had  all  fallen  into  a  way  of  dealing  with  our- 
selves and  with  life  which,  we  see  now,  fails 
utterly  face  to  face  with  man  in  his  heights  and 


THE  TWENTIETH  CENTURY— SO  FAR      9 

depths.  The  fact  is,  we  of  this  generation  for 
the  first  time  are  in  a  position  to  understand 
Christianity  and  the  great  insights  which  Chris- 
tianity has  registered  in  its  doctrines  concerning 
God  and  man.  We  are  beginning  to  understand 
Christianity  in  the  only  way  in  which  you  can 
understand  anything,  namely,  by  perceiving  the 
kind  of  thing  this  life  of  ours  would  be  were 
Christianity  even  now  to  fail.  We  have  been 
taught  the  nature  of  things  in  the  only  way  in 
which  people  can  be  taught  the  nature  of  things, 
and  that  is  by  seeing  things  running  loose  for  a 
time. 

"  Life  and  death,"  says  Paulsen,  "are  the  great 
preachers."  No  man  by  searching  can  find  out 
God,  or  truth.  No  argument  could  ever  have  led 
our  age  to  believe,  or  even  to  suspect,  that  human 
nature  when  it  escapes  from  the  shadow  of  God 
is  as  wild  as  it  ever  was.  That  man  by  nature  is 
wild,  that  man  by  nature  is  simply  a  bit  of  nature, 
and  liable  to  behave  like  an  earthquake  or  like  a 
tidal  wave,  or  like  a  wild  beast  in  some  functional 
ecstasy  (to  adopt  an  illustration  from  one  of  those 
gentle  German  writers) — how  were  ideas  of  that 
kind  ever  to  be  brought  home  to  us,  and  how, 
even  if  their  likelihood  had   been  established  in 


10  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

reason,  could  they  have  been  made  effective  for 
the  rebuke  of  man's  headlongness  ? 

We  had  all  allowed  ourselves  to  suppose  that 
knowledge,  increased  amenities,  savoir-faire, 
would  soften  and  tame  the  primitive  passions. 
We  see  now  that  we  had  no  reason  to  think 
that  knowledge  and  social  amenities  would 
have  such  an  influence.  We  know  that  know- 
ledge by  itself  does  not  make  us  less  selfish 
or  less  determined  to  have  our  own  way,  or  less 
churlish  if  someone  gets  in  front  of  us.  We 
know  that  something  must  take  place  within  us, 
which  is  more  like  crucifixion  than  anything  we 
can  think  of,  before  we  ourselves  gain  a  clean 
victory  over  some  ugly  passion  or  temper.  We 
had  no  reason  whatever  to  suppose  that  Europe 
could  for  fifty  years  be  steadily  undermining  the 
fabric  of  Christianity  in  societies,  and  laying  base 
insinuations  all  about  the  roots  of  the  human  soul, 
and  yet  at  the  same  time  would  have  the  power, 
or  would  have  the  wish,  to  rebuke  the  ancient 
lust  of  the  eye,  and  restrain  the  ancient  pride  of 
life.  What  has  happened  in  our  day  is  simply  this  : 
we  are  seeing  what  life  ought  to  be,  and  what  it 
must  be,  if  the  great  things  that  Christ  means  are 
not  true  and  are  not  felt  to  be  necessary.    For  until 


THE  TWENTIETH  CENTURY— SO  FAR     ii 

a  thing  is  felt  to  be  necessary  it  is  not  believed  in  : 
for  we  believe  not  with  our  heads,  but  most  fre- 
quently by  the  help  of  a  shudder  passing  over  us  at 
the  prospect  of  the  alternative.  What  we  are  see- 
ing to-day  is  perhaps  (since  the  time  of  Julian)  the 
first  organised  and  reasoned  repudiation  of  the 
mind  of  Christ  concerning  the  nature  of  true 
goodness.  And  the  darkness  which  has  come 
over  the  whole  earth  is  once  again  the  protest 
of  the  wider  order  against  a  local  and  temporary 
blasphemy. 

From  this  point  of  view  it  may  be  that  we  are 
approaching  a  new  dawn,  though  here  I  should 
like  to  say  that  I  cannot  imagine  more  mischiev- 
ous language  than  men  are  already  beginning  to 
use,  such  as  that  "  this  terrible  time  is  bound  to 
do  good."  Still,  I  believe  the  very  depth  of  the 
darkness  which  has  fallen  upon  the  modern  world 
will  lead  the  soul  of  man  in  our  day,  and  in  our 
children's  day,  back  to  humility  and  faith.  We 
are  so  made  that  we  do  not  see  things  until  they 
are  gone  from  us.  We  know  nothing  about  our- 
selves until  we  have  found  ourselves  out.  We 
were  all  too  secure  to  feel  our  need  of  God. 
What  errors  certainly  we  had  fallen  into — what 
assurance,  what  pride,  what  dullness  towards  the 


12  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

very  religion  we  profess  !  How  we  had  come  to 
look  upon  faith  in  Christ  as  something  which  a 
man  might  have  or  might  not  have  :  that  it  de- 
pended largely  upon  his  temperament  or  upon  his 
reading!  How  little  we  understood  that  faith  in 
Christ  is  an  absolute  necessity  if  human  existence 
is  to  remain  sane  and  not  a  contradiction  in  terms  ! 
This  leads  me  to  two  points  with  which  I  may 
deal  and  conclude.  I  should  have  liked  to  speak 
of  the  change  in  the  education  of  children  and 
young  people  which  is  likely  to  follow — the 
total  change  and  contradiction  even,  if  Germany 
were  to  win,  or  were  so  much  as  to  score  a  draw. 
One  sees  at  a  glance  how  totally  diverse  the 
ideas  of  the  training  of  young  people  must  be  if 
we  believe  that  the  ideal  is  a  final  brotherhood 
of  nations,  and  that  there  is  a  Power  higher  than 
the  power  of  the  State,  call  it  humanity,  call  it 
God  (one  sees  at  a  glance  how  totally  diverse  the 
ideas  of  the  training  of  young  people,  i.e.  the 
function  of  our  "schools  and  colleges,  must  be), 
from  those  which  will  be  in  vogue  if  it  be  estab- 
lished by  the  brutal  fact  and  issue  that  those 
nations  have  the  best  chance  to  survive  which 
are  organised  to  create  terror.  Leaving  that, 
however,  there  are  some  things  which  the  present 


THE  TWENTIETH  CENTURY— SO  FAR      13 

darkness  has  made  visible  to  me.  What  nonsense 
we  used  to  talk  when  we  said  "  that  it  did  not 
matter  so  much  what  a  man  believed,  that  the 
great  thing  was  to  live  well " !  We  had  the 
tiresome  contrast  between  creed  and  conduct,  a 
contrast  which  I  have  no  doubt  had  at  one  time 
a  moral  value,  in  a  community,  for  example,  in 
which  the  traditional  faith  had  never  been  dis- 
turbed ;  but  a  contrast  which  had  no  sense 
whatever,  and  might  easily  become  the  minister 
of  evil  in  a  community  which  was  only  too  ready 
to  hear  that  the  delicate  barriers  of  the  soul  had 
no  sanction  in  God,  that  those  high  doctrines 
concerning  God  and  man,  concerning  Guilt  and 
the  difficulty  of  forgiveness,  were  no  longer  so 
sure,  that,  in  fact,  "they  didn't  know  everything 
down  in  Judee  "  ! 

And  now,  in  the  midst  of  all  this  palaver,  the 
world  has  gone  wild,  has  broken  loose.  And 
where  has  it  broken  loose?  Through  what 
sluice-gate  has  the  black  flood  poured  ?  Through 
what  bulwark,  ruined  now,  and  shattered,  and 
undermined  ?  Simply  for  this  reason,  namely — 
Europe  to-day  is  not  unanimous  about  God.  It 
is  without  any  Decisive  and  Implacable  sense 
of — the  Nature  of  God,     We  are  at  war  to-day 


14  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

because  we  are  not  at  one  as  to  the  Nature  of 
God.  That  is  why  this  is,  in  its  essence,  a  Holy 
War.  The  Kaiser  quite  sincerely  invokes  a 
God  who  to  us  is  the  Devil.  The  fact  is,  that 
the  fight  to-day  is  for  the  Homoousion :  and  it 
is  the  only  controversy  for  which  a  nation  does 
well  to  pour  out  its  blood. 

There  are  two  things  then,  which,  in  the  thick 
darkness  that  is  over  the  whole  earth,  I  seem  to 
see  standing  out  in  a  white  light. 

In  the  first  place,  I  can  see  now,  with  the  entire 
assent  of  my  mind,  how  the  Church  was  led  by 
the  pressure  of  circumstances  which  will  always 
recur,  circumstances  which  spring  from  the  very 
nature  of  human  beings — their  subtilty,  their 
self-seeking,  their  ingenuity  for  giving  fine  names 
and  discovering  fine  reasons  for  ideas  and  am- 
bitions which  they  happen  to  be  passionately 
bent  upon  ; — I  can  see  how  the  Church  was  led 
to  define  the  Nature  of  God,  to  define  the  essence 
and  moral  quality  of  the  Great  Power  behind 
all  things,  and  to  say  explicitly  that,  for  the 
Church,  the  character  of  God  is  Christ.  For 
the  name  of  God — in  the  sense  of  the  Inscrutable 
and  Infinite  Power  behind  all  Creation — is  a 
name  which  may  be  invoked  by  any  audacious 


THE  TWENTIETH  CENTURY— SO  FAR     15 

and  sanguine  human  being.  It  is  simply  a 
"Graven  Image"  of  the  Ineffable.  A  man's 
appropriation  of  the  name  of  God  may  simply 
mean  that  he  himself  is  passionately  persuaded 
of  his  cause,  and  that  he  anticipates  great  diffi- 
culties. 

But  the  name  of  Christ  is  a  name  which  no 
one  can  invoke  with  any  reality  if  the  cause  for 
which  he  invokes  that  name  is  a  cause  which 
cannot  be  made  to  look  harmonious  with  the 
Mind  of  Christ.  It  may  very  well  be  that  the 
word  God  is  a  word  which,  for  a  generation  or 
two,  we  ought  to  abandon.  It  is  a  heathen  word, 
i.e.  a  purely  human  and  natural  word,  and  it  has 
for  the  time  being  lost  its  baptismal  grace.  By 
itself  it  has  no  more  moral  or  intellectual  content 
than  the  symbol  "x." 

The  word  God  is  not  our  characteristic  word. 
And  I  can  now  well  imagine  the  circumstances 
in  which  St.  Paul  broke  out  with  words  which 
have  in  our  day  an  extraordinary  freshness  and 
urgency  :  '  *  For  though  there  be  that  are  called 
gods,  whether  in  heaven  or  on  earth ;  as  there 
are  gods  many,  and  lords  many ;  yet  to  us  there 
is  one  God,  the  Father,  of  whom  are  all  things, 
and  we  unto  Him ;  and  one  Lord,  Jesus  Christ, 


1 6  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

through  whom  are  all  things,  and  we  through 
Him." 

The  second  thing  which  I  see  with  greater 
clearness  in  the  darkness  is  this :  that  the  only 
just  war  that  a  nation  can  engage  in,  is  a  war  of 
ultimate  ideas,  a  religious  war.  It  was  another 
of  the  foolish  things  we  used  to  say  in  the  day  of 
our  deadness  and  security  :  we  used  to  turn  up 
our  eyes  and  say  how  wrong  and  sinful  it  was  for 
people  to  fight  about  religion.  We  see  now  that 
there  is  nothing  else  for  which  a  nation  must 
honourably  contend.  Nations  have  fought  for 
\erritory,  for  trade,  for  revenge :  and  these  were 
mean  struggles.  But  to  fight  for  an  idea  about 
all  life,  to  fight  for  an  interpretation  of  human 
nature,  to  fight  for  the  very  definition  of  God, — 
a  matter,  i.e.,  of  such  a  kind  that,  if  we  triumph, 
our  children  and  our  children's  children  shall  be 
with  us  in  life  and  in  death  and  after  death  ;  and 
if  we  fail,  our  children  and  our  children's  children 
must  reject  our  testimony,  and  make  for  some 
strange  fierce  heaven — to  fight  for  the  true  nature 
of  man,  and  of  society,  and  of  God, — what  else 
did  we  come  into  this  world  for  ?  For  what  is  it 
"  to  fight,"  except  "  to  suffer  "  } 

That  is  not  a  proper  contrast  which  we  draw 


THE  TWENTIETH  CENTURY— SO  FAR     17 

between  War  and  Peace.  There  is  no  necessary 
contradiction  between  War  and  Peace.  The 
real  contradiction  is  between  Wrong  and 
Peace.  In  a  world,  the  heart  of  which  is 
good,  and  good  in  the  sense  in  which  we  say 
that  Christ  is  good — in  such  a  world  there  is  no 
enduring  peace,  nor  even  the  beginning  of  peace, 
except  by  the  way  of  a  common  acknowledgment 
of  what  God  is :  **  And  for  us  there  is  but  one 
God,  the  Father ;  and  one  Lord,  Jesus  Christ." 


II 

IS  AN  AGE  OF  FAITH  RETURNING? 

IT  is  Mr.  Balfour,  among  those  who  in  recent 
years  have  published  their  reflections  upon 
the  present  situation,  who  observes  that  the  great 
movements  which  history  records  have  in  every 
case  been  "  irrational. "  They  have  come  to  life, 
not  as  the  result  of  intellectual  statement  or 
appeal,  but  always  in  obedience  to  forces  at  first 
so  obscure  and  in  the  day  of  their  power  so 
complicated  and  diverse,  that  it  is  impossible  to 
isolate  or  name  them  or  to  relate  them  to  man's 
average  behaviour. 

We  may  accept  Mr.  Balfour's  generalisation  as 
giving  the  impression  which  history  makes  upon 
a  spectator,  and,  remembering  the  limitations  of  a 
spectator,  as  accurate, — that  the  more  remarkable 
episodes  and  crises  in  human  affairs  have  ever 
been  "  irrational."  That,  however,  must  not  be 
held  to  mean  that  they  occurred  without  reason ; 


IS  AN  AGE  OF  FAITH  RETURNING?      19 

but  only  that  they  occurred  in  obedience  to  some 
force  which  was  a  new  element  in  the  particular 
age ;  a  force  therefore  which,  because  it  was  new, 
did  violence  to  the  mental  habits  of  the  observers 
of  that  time.  The  fact  is,  there  is  something 
irrational  in  everything  that  moves.  It  moves, 
not  for  reasons  that  may  be  given,  but  in 
obedience  to  something  more  primitive  and 
elementary.  In  the  last  analysis  the  force  behind 
any  movement  is  something  which  is  "there." 
The  movement  is  the  expression  of  it,  the  sign  of 
it,  the  opposition  of  life's  ancient  circumstances  to 
it ;  but  it  itself  is  original,  irrational,  free.  It  is 
therefore  no  disparagement  of  a  movement  that 
it  is  irrational ;  for  that  is  only  to  say  that  it 
is  spontaneous,  living — a  new  contribution  to  the 
sum  of  energy  in  the  world.  Great  movements 
are  irrational  in  the  precise  sense  that  every  act 
of  life  is  irrational ;  for  every  act  of  life  is  the 
expression  of  something  which,  in  itself,  has 
nothing  to  do  with  man's  reasoning  powers. 
"  Rationality,"  in  the  restricted  sense  of  the  word, 
is  as  little  the  impulse  or  vital  element  in  human 
affairs  on  any  scale,  as  the  rudder  is  the  power 
which  drives  a  ship  through  the  water. 

We  shall  return  later  to  this  point.     Meanwhile, 


20  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

let  us  consider  some  signs,  as  they  seem  to  me  to 
be,  that  a  very  great  change  is  already  beginning 
to  take  place  in  the  public  mind,  one  of  those 
changes  so  obscure  in  its  beginnings,  so  diverse 
in  its  fruits,  so  contemptuous  of  maxims  which 
until  yesterday  appeared  to  be  incontrovertible, 
that  it  may  yet  come  to  be  included  amongst 
movements  which  have  that  quality  of  "irration- 
ality "  which  is  the  proof  of  a  certain  inevitableness 
and  authenticity. 

On  the  principle  of  the  swing  of  the  pendulum, 
we  ought  to  anticipate  a  reaction  against  a  mood 
which  has  dominated  men  during,  to  speak 
roughly,  the  last  generation.  It  is  possible,  no 
doubt,  to  give  an  airy  and  cynical  interpretation 
of  this  pendulum  principle, — that  it  is  due  to  the 
incurable  levity  of  the  public  mind.  But  a  more 
serious  and  honourable  explanation  is  also 
competent.  Any  reaction  which  is  widespread, 
and  has  the  note  of  spontaneity,  will  be  found  to 
be  the  protest  of  man's  entire  nature  against  the 
arrogance  and  tyranny  of  one  aspect  or  faculty  of 
that  nature.  We  have  the  instinct  for  freedom, 
for  self-assertion  ;  but — it  may  be  a  reminiscence 
in  our  blood,  or  it  may  be  the  calling  and  election 
of  God — we  have  also  the  instinct  to  deal  severely 


IS  AN  AGE  OF  FAITH  RETURNING?      21 

with  ourselves, — the  instinct  of  obedience,  of 
bondage.  We  will  wander  making  our  experi- 
ments in  living  ;  but  we  will  tire  of  our  freedom, 
and  become  reverent,  or  even  panic-stricken. 
There  are  signs,  it  seems  to  me,  that  men,  in 
certain  matters,  are  beginning  to  have  misgivings, 
beginning  to  fear  they  have  gone  far  enough  ; 
signs  of  a  certain  timidity  which  will  be  con- 
demned as  weakness  by  some  still  strenuous  minds, 
but  which  will  be  regarded  by  others  as  belonging 
equally  to  man's  true  nature,  as  the  sign  of  his 
inevitable  need  of  some  shelter  for  his  spirit. 
But,  not  to  dwell  longer  upon  the  principle  of  the 
swing  of  the  pendulum,  though  it  is  not  to  be 
neglected  in  any  forecast  of  the  public  mood,  it  is 
possible  to  name  certain  misgivings  and  grounds  of 
anxiety  which  supply  the  very  condition  for  a  total 
change  in  men's  attitude  towards  life  and  affairs. 

There  is  one  circumstance  which  weighs  upon 
the  minds  of  serious  observers  who  look  forward, 
to  which  I  shall  barely,  and  even  that  with 
difficulty,  allude.  I  refer  to  it  at  the  present 
moment,  because  it  also  is  a  symptom  of  the 
absence  in  the  general  mind  of  some  powerful  and 
unquestioned  rule  or  standard,  which  might  help 
us  in  the  lonely  business  of  life.     If  statistics  are 


22  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

to  be  trusted,  and  certain  ominous  words  spoken 
from  time  to  time  by  those  who  are  qualified  to 
know,  society  to-day,  almost  from  top  to  bottom, 
is  trifling  with  certain  natural  duties  and  responsi- 
bilities in  ways  which  we  usually  associate  with 
the  decadent  days  of  Imperial  Rome.  If  this  be 
as  is  alleged,  it  means  that  with  all  our  knowledge 
we  are  on  the  threshold  of  unworthy  and  threaten- 
ing days.  For  my  own  part,  I  do  not  believe 
that  a  view  of  family  life,  which  must  always 
seem  hideous  to  wholesome  and  unsophisticated 
minds,  is  about  to  take  up  a  permanent  place 
amongst  us.  But  simply  because  this  abandon- 
ment of  natural  life  has  its  root  and  defence  in 
personal  selfishness,  in  love  of  ease  and  vanity  ; 
and  because,  in  such  an  atmosphere,  vice  of  that 
kind  seems  not  right  indeed,  but  yet  not  terrible, 
I  have  no  hope  that  it  will  be  swept  out  of  lives, 
except  by  the  recovery  of  an  instinct,  in  a  wave 
of  horror  and  indignation  and  revenge,  such  as 
is  let  loose  by  the  vision  of  God.  It  is  one 
of  Pater's  deep  and  beautiful  insights,  that  the 
religion  of  Jesus,  when  it  came  home  to  the 
hearts  of  Roman  ladies  of  patrician  rank,  brought 
with  it  a  new  reverence  for  the  elementary 
conditions  of  life. 


IS  AN  AGE  OF  FAITH  RETURNING?      23 

It  would  be  an  easy  matter  to  name  additional 
symptoms  in  the  life  and  expression  of  our  people, 
to  show  that  we  are  living  from  hand  to  mouth, 
without  the  moral  order  and  peace  which  come  of 
obedience  to  some  faith  or  vision.  Education  has 
brought  no  moral  motive ;  and  we  are  beginning 
to  see  that  it  was  idle  to  look  for  such  motive  in 
mere  knowledge.  The  social  question,  likewise, 
is  now  beginning  to  be  apprehended,  even  by 
those  who  at  one  time  dreamed  dreams  of  whole- 
sale amelioration,  as,  when  all  is  said,  a  moral 
question ;  that  without  the  socially  regenerate 
man,  the  best  conceived  scheme  will  fail. 

This  same  feeling — that  meanwhile  there  is 
something  awanting,  something  which  in  better 
days  we  and  our  fathers  knew,  something  without 
which  we  are  at  a  disadvantage — has  become  a 
real  discovery  in  the  Church.  In  the  various 
denominations,  this  consciousness  of  inability,  this 
sense  at  the  same  time  of  a  completeness  which 
nevertheless  is  possible,  manifests  itself  in  various 
ways.  Ultimately  there  are  only  two  attitudes 
which  are  possible  to  men  in  real  distress — the 
Roman  Catholic  and  the  Reformed  ;  the  one  to 
give  up  the  world,  the  other  to  call  upon  God. 
Every  Church  just  now  is  living  too  much  by  its 


24  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

wits.  Never  did  men  in  office  in  the  Church 
work  harder.  Never  were  they  more  willing  to 
learn.  Never  were  church  buildings  so  constantly 
in  use.  Never  were  appeals  more  insistent.  Yet 
at  the  best,  "having  done  all,  we  stand."  Such 
success  as  the  Churches  may  claim  is  not  of  the 
highest  possible  quality  ;  it  is  too  much  fretted 
with  anxiety  and  labour.  It  wants  certain  notes 
of  peace,  of  fullness,  of  that  confidence  in  God 
which  has  the  victory  over  the  world.  It  is  not 
pregnant,  overflowing.  It  has  a  basis  of  worry 
and  strain.     It  has  enough  to  do  with  itself. 

I  note  these  signs,  not  in  order  to  disparage 
them,  for,  indeed,  it  may  be  that  they  were  in- 
evitable. I  note  them  because  there  once  again 
we  encounter,  and  this,  in  the  case  of  the  most 
sensitive  and  potent  people  in  our  community,  a 
condition  of  unstable  equilibrium,  of  discord  and 
uneasiness,  of  insecurity  through  which  the  secret 
yearning  rises  for  that  state  of  soul  in  which  the 
strife  is  past.  But  what  I  wish  to  say  about  this 
present-day  temper  and  outlook  in  the  Churches 
is,  that  it  is  a  condition  of  things  which  will  not 
continue.  It  is  a  condition  of  things  out  of  which 
an  entirely  new  attitude  and  settlement  may  very 
suddenly  take  place.     After  all,  the  community  is 


IS  AN  AGE  OF  FAITH  RETURNING?      25 

the  individual  writ  large.  We  know  how,  in  the 
case  of  a  man,  there  is  a  limit  to  the  amount  of 
worry  and  harassment  which  he  will  endure.  A 
point  is  reached  when  he  can  worry  no  more.  At 
that  point  he  flings  up  his  hands,  in  faith  or  in 
despair.  Just  so,  the  Church  which  has  been 
subjected  for  many  years  to  a  strain  in  every 
region  of  its  life  comes  to  a  point  where  it  either 
loses  heart  and  becomes  a  tame  accessory  to  the 
general  situation,  or  appeals  from  its  own  con- 
fessed failure  and  inability  to  the  right  hand  of 
God. 

Enough  has  been  said  to  show  that  at  this 
present  time  we  have  reached  as  a  community 
that  temper  of  unrest  and  misgiving, — having 
ideals  which  we  will  not  abandon,  which  never- 
theless we  cannot  fulfil ;  depressed  by  the  failure 
of  mere  knowledge  to  increase  or  even  to  sustain 
our  moral  energy  ;  suspicious  of  words  and  ideas 
which  have  had  their  turn  and  have  failed ;  and 
in  all  this  the  vague  confidence  that  there  is  a 
more  excellent  way — the  temper,  in  short,  which 
itself  is  the  invitation  and  prelude  to  a  total  change 
of  attitude. 

Certain  as  I  am  that  as  a  community  we  shall 
get  out  of  this  condition  of  strain  and  confusion 


26  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

somehow,  I  hold  that  already  there  are  many 
signs  that  we  are  about  to  emerge  on  the  honour- 
able side  of  the  morass. 

It  is  one  way  of  stating  the  terms  of  the 
controversy  of  the  last  fifty  years,  to  say  that  it 
has  been  a  battle  between  man  and  the  universe* 
between  man  with  his  instinctive  and  traditional 
ideas  of  himself — his  dignity,  his  significance  on 
the  one  hand,  and,  on  the  other,  the  infinite 
world — nature,  history,  all  things.  Or,  to  use  the 
familiar  antithesis,  it  has  been  a  conflict  between 
faith  and  reason,  between  the  heart  and  the 
head. 

During  the  greater  part  of  the  struggle,  the 
advantage  lay  with  those  forces  which  we  gather 
together  under  the  name  of  "  science."  This  is 
not  to  be  wondered  at.  Science  was  fresh,  and 
much  on  the  other  side  was  indefensible.  So  far, 
no  sensible  or  just  man  was  alarmed.  But  the 
engagement  proceeded.  "  Faith  "  seemed  to  be 
driven  to  her  last  ditch.  But  now,  that  is  to  say 
yesterday,  when  science,  as  it  seemed,  was  about 
to  deal  the  coup  de  grdce,  her  arm  has  grown 
heavy,  and  a  look  of  anxiety  has  come  into  her 
hitherto  bold  countenance.  Meanwhile  "faith," 
taking    advantage   it   may   be    of    the   signs   of 


IS  AN  AGE  OF  FAITH  RETURNING?      27 

weakness  on  the  other  side,  or,  it  may  be,  summon- 
ing her  last  reserves,  is  manifesting  such  vitaHty 
that  it  is  quite  credible  she  may  win  back  many  a 
position ;  indeed,  may  win  back  more  than  she 
can  safely  hold.  For  every  mood  is  absolute 
so  long  as  it  lasts  ;  and,  in  such  a  conflict  as  we 
are  speaking  of,  the  situation  at  the  last  ditch  is 
apt  to  decide  the  question  everywhere.  Without 
metaphor,  it  seems  to  me  that  man's  "personality," 
which  in  reality  was  being  threatened  by  the 
formulas  and  deductions  of  materialistic  science, 
is  showing  signs  of  recovery  ;  and,  because  the 
sense  of  personality  once  confirmed  will  proceed 
to  claim  its  inherent  rights,  and  at  the  further 
stage  to  take  up  its  duties  and  responsibilities,  the 
survival  and  reinforcement  of  personality  is  a 
conclusion  which  must  be  hailed  with  satisfaction 
by  all  who  would  not  despair  of  the  human 
enterprise. 

In  what  remains  of  this  paper,  let  me  indicate 
some  features  in  the  mental  situation,  more  or  less 
public  and  apparent,  which  seem  to  me  to  mean 
that  after  a  long  period  of  depression,  of  low 
spirits,  of  a  kind  of  shamefacedness  and  apology 
the  soul  of  man — man,  i.e.,  contrasted  with  his 
natural   circumstances — is  about  to   stand  up ;  is 


28  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

already,  indeed,  upon  his  feet,  with  something  of 
the  ancient  daring  in  his  eyes. 

That  the  Christian  Science  propaganda  should 
begin  and  should  find  such  a  welcome  in  an 
age  and  amongst  habits  of  thought  diametrically 
opposed  to  its  ideas,  is  a  shining  illustration  of 
how  extremes  meet.  Sympathetically  considered, 
also,  it  gives  the  rationale,  the  inner  reasonable- 
ness, of  that  long-established  maxim.  Extremes 
meet  for  the  same  reason  as  tyrannies  are  over- 
thrown. The  latter  extreme  is  the  passionate 
reaction,  often  unjust  and  disastrous  but  inevitable, 
against  the  former.  To  the  ipse  dixit  of  material- 
ism, becoming  more  and  more  strident  and  cock- 
sure, that  there  is  nothing  but  matter  in  the  world. 
Christian  science  with  equal  self-confidence  replies 
that  there  is  nothing  but  spirit.  Now,  it  is  not 
the  purpose  of  this  paper  to  enter  into  proofs,  or 
to  justify  the  general  movement,  signs  of  which 
are  here  alleged.  My  purpose  is  simply  to  name 
some  signs,  as  they  seem  to  me,  that,  whether 
rightly  or  wrongly  in  an  absolute  sense,  the 
general  mind  to-day  is  steadily  inclining  towards 
a  certain  considerateness  and  attitude  of  attention 
with  regard  to  the  spiritual  view  of  man  and  the 
world. 


IS  AN  AGE  OF  FAITH  RETURNING?      29 

The  same  interpretation  may  legitimately  be 
given  of  the  remarkable  revival  of  the  "occult" 
in  our  time.  It  is  idle,  it  is  simply  not  true,  to 
say  that  this  dabbling  in  the  black  arts  is  confined 
to  those  few  queer  people  whom  we  shall  always 
have  with  us,  and  that  it  is  without  significance. 
One  has  only  to  walk  up  and  down  a  street  in  the 
busier  part  of  any  of  our  cities  to  see  what  a  trade 
must  be  going  on  in  the  unseen  and  the  diabolical. 
It  may  not  be  a  comfortable  sign ;  indeed,  it 
points  to  a  real  peril  which  will  accompany  any 
wholesale  return  to  faith,  as  it  has  accompanied 
every  such  instinctive  and  elementary  movement 
in  past  times.  But  it  is  the  sign,  I  believe,  of  a 
kind  of  wild  revenge  which  the  spiritual  side  of 
our  human  nature  is  celebrating  as  a  protest 
against  its  long  neglect.  As  such,  it  gives  an 
insight  into  the  necessities  of  human  nature ;  that 
in  the  absence  of  the  prophet  from  the  soul,  in 
the  absence  of  some  honourable  faith,  which  will 
control  the  fluid  and  haunting  faculties  of  man, 
there  may  take  place,  even  in  the  most  enlightened 
society,  a  kind  of  stampede  into  dark  and 
dubious  and  imbecile  things.  By  themselves, 
these  things  are  disheartening  and  deplorable 
enough,  but  they  are  not  by  themselves.     They 


30  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

are  rather  like  pieces  of  paper  and  bits  of  straw 
and  clouds  of  dust  blown  about  by  a  wind  which, 
nevertheless,  is  a  good  enough  wind,  bearing  ships 
out  to  sea  and  home. 

I  have  already  alluded,  in  a  'phrase,  to  the  note 
of  relenting,  of  misgiving  and  insecurity,  which 
has  come  into  the  testimony  of  science  on  its 
speculative,  or,  so  to  call  it,  its  metaphysical  side. 
I  think  this  much  may  be  claimed  by  the  so  long 
hard-pressed  camp  of  idealists,  that  science  has 
been  taught  her  place.  To  speak  fairly,  science 
has  become  sober  and  judicial,  as  is  the  way  of 
youth  always,  not  in  deference  to  the  advice  of 
those  who  were  alarmed  by  her  recklessness,  but 
by  her  own  discoveries  as  she  proceeded.  Time 
is  on  the  side  of  all  the  facts.  It  has  become 
evident  that  when  science  leaves  her  sphere  of 
criticism  and  observation,  and  presumes  to  unveil 
the  last  source  or  final  purpose  of  things,  she  can 
only  guess  or  talk  nonsense.  And  it  is  very 
wonderful  how  widely  that  essential  limitation 
of  science  has  come  to  be  known  and  understood 
by  average  people.  Wonderful,  too,  is  it,  how 
commonly  it  is  now  understood  that  science,  not 
one  whit  less  than  revelation,  needs  postulates, 
needs   to    create   an   atmosphere   of  hypothesis, 


IS  AN  AGE  OF  FAITH  RETURNING?      31 

needs  to  make  demands  upon  faith,  in  order  to  get 
even  under  way.  That  all  her  processes  rest  upon 
a  credulity  with  regard  to  fundamental  things,  as 
thorough-going  as  is  required  by  the  twin- 
postulates  of  God  and  the  soul.  The  serious 
banter  of  such  books,  to  name  but  one,  as  Dr. 
Ward's  Naturalism  and  Agnosticism^  in  which 
science  will  seem  to  fair-minded  people  to  be  hoist 
with  its  own  petard,  has  found  its  way,  and  now 
serves  as  a  caution  in  minds  which  formerly  rioted 
in  negative  proofs.  And  such  a  state  of  things, 
because  it  raises  a  subtle  barrier  of  scepticism 
against  science  whenever  science  seems  to  invade 
some  ancient  safeguard  of  man's  peace,  is  a  result 
which  is  already  of  great  consequence  for  faith, 
and,  in  the  event  of  any  notable  movement 
towards  belief,  will  throw  wide  open  many  a  door. 
It  is  an  immense  relief  for  some  people  to  know, 
on  the  authority  of  university  men,  that  one  may 
believe  in  God,  without  being  intellectually  an 
ass. 

You  see  symptoms  of  the  same  subtle  difference 
of  temper  in  contemporary  philosophical  writing. 
Here,  very  abundantly,  you  have  signs  that  man 
is  fast  coming  into  his  own  again.  Even  a  worm 
must  turn  if  he  would  have  his  wrongs  observed. 


32  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

To  a  philosophy  which  had  come  to  regard  man 
as  a  mere  article  in  the  Inventory  of  the  Universe, 
there  has  arisen  amongst  us  a  philosophy  prepared 
to  wait  upon  man,  hoping  to  attain  to  wisdom  by 
observing  patiently  and  with  reverence  man's 
habitual  and  instinctive  life.  "Pragmatism," 
"soft  determinism,"  "personal  idealism  "  are  but 
names  for  a  new  mood,  a  new  point  of  view  ;  the 
one  thing  about  which  I  desire  at  this  time  to 
note  being,  that  it  puts  the  accent  and  emphasis 
upon  man.  When  one  contrasts  the  idealistic 
philosophy  of  even  twenty  years  ago  with  the 
writing  which  to-day,  on  the  whole,  occupies  the 
same  place  in  the  intellectual  field,  one  notes,  I 
think  above  all  other  differences,  a  new  robustness, 
a  spirit  of  confidence,  a  certain  glow  and  intoxica- 
tion even,  a  zest  for  the  battle,  which  were  want- 
ing from  the  earlier  phase.  Idealists  to-day  are 
very  cheery  persons.  Rightly  or  wrongly,  they 
feel  that  they  have  the  ball  at  their  foot.  They 
are  not  ashamed  at  times  to  reply  to  an  argument 
with  a  laugh  or  by  telling  a  good  story.  When 
a  controversialist  on  the  other  side  has  circum- 
stantially demonstrated  the  intellectual  impossi- 
bility of  "  believing,"  they  will  answer,  as  one  did 
the  other  day,  by  protesting  that,  at  the  time  of 


IS  AN  AGE  OF  FAITH  RETURNING?      33 

writing,  he  is  simply  prancing  with  belief.  In 
short,  able  men  to-day  have  the  hardihood  to 
appeal  from  the  sophistry  of  pure  reason  to  the 
generous  intimations  of  a  healthy  temperament. 
It  may  be  very  Philistine  ;  but  it  is  very  human. 
It  is  the  true  and  only  useful  positivism.  One 
thing  is  certain,  it  is  there,  cheerful  and  un- 
ashamed. It  is  one  of  those  "irrational  "  move- 
ments, one  of  those  "  offences  "  against  the  pure 
reason  "which  must  needs  come,"  in  which  some 
elementary  instinct  or  function,  long  denied,  finds 
at  length  its  voice,  and  utters  its  uncontrollable 
joy.  For,  as  Caponsacchi  said  :  "A  man  grows 
drunk  with  truth,  stagnant  within  him."  This 
latest  movement  in  philosophy,  though  doubtless 
it  had  its  impulse  in  the  essential  nature  of  man, 
and  denotes  a  protest  by  one  long  thwarted 
element  of  our  life  against  the  tyranny  of  the  pure 
reason,  has  already  made  some  valuable  contri- 
butions to  the  apologetic  for  faith,  over  and  above 
that  sense  of  cheerfulness  with  which  it  has 
infected  a  great  company  of  thinking  people.  It 
may  be  that  not  one  of  those  contributions  would 
convince  a  man  who  was  disinclined  to  believe ; 
but  coming  as  they  do  at  a  time  when,  I  contend, 
a  great  mass  of  people  are  waiting  for  a  decent 
3 


34  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

excuse  to  believe,  they  have  the  decisive  effect  of 
turning  the  scale.  For  it  is  one  of  the  positions 
which  this  new  philosophic  tendency  is  not 
ashamed  to  occupy, — that  no  pure  reason  can 
ever  be  given  for  any  act  of  personal  life,  that  we 
seldom  act  on  reason,  that  the  deepest  things 
cannot  be  proved,  that  every  step  we  take  here 
in  this  world  is  a  leap  in  the  dark,  that  the 
evidence  always  stops  short,  and  that  there  is  no 
way  of  filling  up  the  gap  except  by  putting  one- 
self into  it ;  in  short,  that  we  live  by  faith,  in 
obedience  to  a  profound  and  unconquerable 
instinct  that,  to  put  it  variously,  a  cosmos  cannot 
have  chaos  for  its  crown,  that  there  is  a  final 
correspondence  between  man  and  the  Universe, 
or,  in  the  language  of  piety,  that  "this  is  none 
other  than  the  house  of  God  and  the  gate  of 
Heaven." 

Along  that  line  of  insight  rather  than  of  argu- 
ment, it  is  not  difficult  to  show  that  there  are 
certain  high  postulates,  prejudices,  beliefs,  without 
which  man  will  never  be  able  to  accomplish  the 
long  task  of  life,  to  overcome  its  disheartening 
details  ;  without  which,  most  certainly,  he  will 
never  bring  into  play  the  most  precious  qualities 
of  his  mysterious  nature,     Indeed,  so  utterly  do 


IS  AN  AGE  OF  FAITH  RETURNING?      35 

we  live  at  the  bidding  of  these  intangible  and 
potent  instincts,  that  if  it  could  be  brought  home 
to  mankind  that  these  were  not  true,  that  they 
did  not  represent  realities,  it  is  fair  to  predict  that 
life  would  come  to  a  standstill,  and  this  suicide 
and  despair  would  begin  with  the  best  first.  From 
that  position  it  is  a  leap  which  competent  men 
who  see  the  consequences  of  the  other  view  are 
prepared  to-day  to  take,  that  such  prejudices  and 
postulates,  such  beliefs  and  intuitions  and  instincts 
as  lie  at  the  root  of  man's  normal  and  healthy  life, 
have  in  that  very  circumstance  sufficient  proof 
and  defence.     **  Securus  judicat  orbis  terrarum." 

Already  this  recovery  of  personality  has  led  to 
a  new  sense  of  human  responsibility  in  the  teach- 
ings of  the  most  recent  philosophy.  Idealism, 
twenty  years  ago,  was  for  the  most  part  rabbinical. 
It  contented  itself  with  proving  that  the  idealistic 
view  was  rationally  tenable.  It  seems  tome  that 
to-day  the  note  is  nothing  short  of  this,  that  the 
idealistic  view  is  humanly  necessary.  Formerly, 
idealists  were  content  to  go  on,  registering  the 
state  of  the  barometer,  telling  us  from  time  to 
time  the  condition  of  the  weather;  to-day,  the 
philosophers  have  begun  to  preach.  It  is  not 
putting   the   situation  unfairly  to  say,  that  from 


36  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

declaring  unweariedly,  using  the  terminology  of 
Hegelianism,  that  all  is  well,  and  bound  to  turn 
out  well,  philosophy  to-day  has  begun  to  declare 
that  everything  may  yet  be  well ;  but  that  for  that 
very  reason  everything  is  bound  to  go  wrong, 
unless  we,  actual  living  men,  see  to  it ! 

Further,  the  disabling  and  morbid  idea  that  we 
act  with  human  propriety  only  when  we  act  for 
reasons  apprehended,  that  therefore  we  ought  to 
hold  ourselves  in  suspense  on  such  a  momentous 
matter  as  our  personal  faith  and  not  commit  our- 
selves, lest  through  further  knowledge  we  should 
learn  that  we  had  decided  wrongly,  that  morbid 
idea,  which  really  would  keep  us  in  bed  all  day, 
has  largely  given  way  under  this  new  access  of 
health  and  energy.  We  see  now  that  those  who 
ask  us  to  withhold  our  assent  to  faith,  and  to 
restrain  ourselves  from  faithful  actions,  until  the 
evidence  is  complete,  lest  further  knowledge  should 
show  us  that  we  had  chosen  wrongly,  are  asking 
of  us  something  which  we  are  not  in  the  habit  of 
conceding  in  any  other  department  of  our  life. 
We  live  and  learn  ;  not  learn  and  live. 

To  the  whole  contention  of  this  paper  it  may 
be  opposed,  that  since  the  time  of  the  last  great 
reinforcement  of  religious   faculty  and   personal 


IS  AN  AGE  OF  FAITH  RETURNING?      37 

idealism — since,  in  short,  those  days  when  last 
"the  sea  of  faith  was  at  the  full" — discoveries 
have  been  made  as  to  the  processes  of  nature, 
and  criticisms  of  the  historic  documents  of  spiritual 
belief  have  been  established,  with  the  effect  of 
disturbing  all  accepted  ideas.  That,  in  conse- 
quence, never  again  can  we  have  a  return  to  faith 
as  faith  has  hitherto  been  conceived.  But  that  is 
just  what  I  deny.  Admitting  that  science  and 
criticism  have  in  their  several  regions  changed 
many  things,  this  will  never  withstand  a  genuine 
outbreak  of  temperament,  a  genuine  return  of 
spring  and  summer  to  the  soul  of  man.  If  such 
a  movement  is  really  due,  it  will  soon  find  new 
reasons — a  new  intellectual  statement  and  defence. 
But  at  first  it  will  need  none  of  these  things. 
Thomas  Paine's  criticisms  of  Biblical  literature 
have  perhaps  never  been  answered  ;  but  when 
the  Spirit  moved,  when  men  were  searched  anew 
by  some  elementary  moral  disquietude  which  led 
them  to  cry  out  in  despair  and  faith,  the  things 
that  Paine  had  said  seemed  far  away.  "  Simulat 
que  increpuit  suspitio  tumultus,  ilico  nostrae  artes 
conticescunt."  A  drowning  man  is  not  aware  that 
he  is  wet. 

The  faith  to  which,  as  it  seems  to  me,  we  are 


19G299 


38  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

about  to  return,  will  not  be  the  same  in  many 
particulars  as  that  of  any  previous  time  ;  but  it 
will  have  the  same  background,  the  same  funda- 
mental attitude.  It  will  be  a  newly  recovered 
confidence  in  life,  in  that  body  of  personal  facts, 
of  moral  misgivings,  flashes  of  the  ideal  and  the 
holy,  reminiscences  of  some  previous  condition  of 
private  integrity  and  peace,  with  the  corrobora- 
tions of  these  which,  to  the  hearing  ear  and  the 
understanding  heart,  seem  to  rise  up  so  fittingly 
out  of  life's  ordinary  events.  The  new  faith  will 
be  a  return,  a  kind  of  homecoming,  to  a  sufficiently 
solid  confidence,  that  in  trusting  those  elements 
of  our  nature  which  urge  us  and  help  us  on  to- 
wards what  seems  best,  we  are  not  deceived ; 
that  rather,  in  those  so  personal  intimations  and 
contacts,  we  are  dealing  with  Reality,  and  with 
that  kind  of  reality  which,  for  beings  such  as 
we  are,  and  placed  as  we  are,  is  our  proper  and 
abiding  concern ;  that  though  it  is  at  best  but 
relative  proof  that  we  have  attained,  this  is  no 
disparagement,  but  means  only  that  it  is  absolute 
— for  us  and  so  far.  "  If  hopes  were  dupes,  fears 
may  be  liars." 

Nathaniel  Hawthorne  tells  the  story  of  a  child 
who  had  a  mark — a  birthmark — on  her  face.    She 


IS  AN  AGE  OF  FAITH  RETURNING?      39 

grew  to  be  a  beautiful  woman — beautiful,  though 
the  mark  remained.  Her  husband,  vain  and 
ambitious,  set  himself  to  have  the  mark  wiped 
out.  He  summoned  science  to  deal  with  nature. 
Under  the  treatment  the  birthmark  began  to 
recede,  though  meanwhile  the  victim  languished. 
An  hour  came  when  the  mark  was  gone,  but  in 
that  hour  the  sweet  woman  died. 

There  is  no  explanation  of  things  which 
accounts  for  so  many  of  the  facts,  as  simply  to 
say,  that  on  the  soul  of  man  there  is  an  ineradic- 
able birthmark  which,  at  times,  stands  out. 


Ill 

THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE 

IpOR  us,  in  Europe,  there  is  at  the  moment 
only  one  object,  and  it  is  to  reach  a  decision 
(I  speak  for  myself)  on  the  question  of  the  ulti- 
mate basis  of  life,  for  the  individual  and  for 
society  :  whether  it  is  to  be  conceived  as  natural 
or  as  spiritual. 

We,  in  Great  Britain,  since  the  war  began, 
have  been  reading  with  every  variety  of  emotion, 
from  surprise  to  terror,  books  by  Treitschke,  von 
Bernhardi,  and  the  others.  And,  not  to  put  it 
too  finely,  we  have  the  feelings  towards  those 
who  are  in  the  field  against  us  which  we  should 
have  towards  people  who  had  often  taken  a  meal 
with  us,  about  whom  we  had  just  learned  that  all 
the  time  they  were  carrying  about  in  their  pocket 
a  wonderful  formula  for  poisoning  the  soup  ! 

Perhaps  it  is  to  Hegel,  ultimately,  that  we 
shall  have  to  trace  the  roots  of  this  movement 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE     41 

which  subdues  the  individual  to  the  claims  and 
necessities  of  the  State.  But  it  is  to  Nietzsche, 
with  his  passion,  with  his  style,  that  we  are 
indebted  for  the  glorification  of  force,  for  the  new 
worship  of  Thor  and  Odin,  and  the  new  scorn  for 
those  ideals  which,  as  a  fact  of  history,  Christ 
offered  to  the  world.  It  is  upon  Nietzsche  ulti- 
mately that  von  Bernhardi  bases  his  concise  and 
deliberate  blasphemy, — that  "war  is  a  biological 
necessity."  Let  us  then  consider  Nietzsche, 
whose  spirit  is  behind  all  those  books  and 
papers  and  tracts  which  litter  the  counters  of 
all  our  book  stores. 

Perhaps  we  shall  most  easily  be  just  to 
Nietzsche,  and  shall  best  appreciate  his  signifi- 
cance in  saying  the  things  he  says  at  the  time 
when  he  has  said  them,  if  we  consider  his  work 
^s poetry.  And  I  mean  by  "poetry  "  there  what 
Arnold  meant  when  he  defined  "poetry"  as  the 
"  criticism  of  life," — as  the  reaction  made  upon  an 
elect  and  sensitive  spirit  by  the  aspect  of  things 
at  the  moment.  In  order  to  qualify  for  our 
acceptance  of  him  as  a  poet,  according  to  this 
definition,  it  is  only  necessary  that  Nietzsche 
should  be  able  to  convince  us  of  his  own  sincerity, 
of  his  own  unmixed  loyalty  to  such  insight  as  had 


43  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

been  given  him  ;  and  in  his  case  this  last  had 
a  shrewdness  and  sagacity  almost  sublime  or, 
rather,  diabolical. 

The  mark  of  a  poet,  on  Arnold's  terms,  is, 
above  everything,  spontaneity,  a  natural  and 
incorrigible  gift  of  utterance,  and  utterance  of 
such  a  kind  that  we  feel  as  we  listen  that  it  is  not 
the  result  of  planning  and  calculation,  that  it  is 
rather  the  rising  and  overflow  through  the  spirit  of 
this  man  of  some  well,  deep  in  the  heart  of  things. 

If  I  remember  rightly  what  I  once  learned,  and 
if  I  was  not  misinformed  at  the  time,  it  was  this 
very  quality  of  naturalness  and  fullness,  it  might 
even  be  excess  and  violence,  which  was  the 
accepted  sign  of  the  true  Nabi  or  prophet  of  God. 
His  words  came  pouring  out  without  apology  or 
qualification.  Listening  to  him  men  felt  that  he 
was  not  saying  such  things  for  a  livelihood,  but 
only  because  he  was  doomed  to  say  them.  He 
might  not  be  rational,  or  even  intelligible,  or 
consistent  with  himself  in  his  various  outpourings, 
but  he  was  always  quite  manifestly  the  medium 
or  mouthpiece  of  some  hidden  power;  through 
him  things  were  being  brought  into  the  effective 
life  of  man,  which  had  their  reason  and  justifica- 
tion in  the  deep  Source  of  all  things  and  of  our- 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE     43 

selves.  Face  to  face  with  such  an  elect  spirit, 
it  was  perhaps  the  wisest  course  to  listen  ;  to 
interpret  his  message  by  the  things  of  one's  own 
spirit ;  to  let  his  words  pass  over  us,  if  they  could 
pass  over  us ;  but  if  they  seemed  to  be  finding 
their  way  into  us,  to  attend  to  them. 

Speaking  for  myself,  Nietzsche  seems  to 
answer  to  most  of  these  signs.  He  does  affect 
me  as  an  authentic  voice.  I  confess  that  this 
impression  begins  to  fade  when  I  read  books  on 
Nietzsche  by  disciples  of  his ;  for  these  disciples 
wi// find  a  system  in  Nietzsche,  a  reasoned  defence 
of  some  prejudice  of  their  own ;  and  the  moment 
we  apply  reasoning  to  the  complete  work  of 
Nietzsche  we  disturb  the  atmosphere  in  which,  as 
it  seems  to  me,  he  has  his  proper  effect.  Face 
to  face  with  a  man  of  Nietzsche's  force  and  passion 
and  violence  it  is  futile  to  ask,  at  least  in  the  first 
instance,  whether  he  is  right  or  wrong.  The  fact 
is,  he  is  ^kere ;  and  since  he  is  i(Aere,  it  must  be 
because  in  some  real  sense  he  was  due.  "  Thou 
askest  why?"  he  writes, — and  here  you  have  his 
humour  everywhere, — "  Thou  askest  why  ?  I 
am  not  one  of  those  who  may  be  asked  for  their 
whys !  I  am  not  a  barrel  of  memory  to  have  my 
reasons  with  me !  " 


44  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

Now  when  you  separate  from  these  sayings  the 
insolence  which  tries  us  so  much  in  Nietzsche, 
they  are  not  wholly  illegitimate.  As  reason- 
ing, it  is  quite  as  forcible  on  the  merely  logical 
plane  as,  say,  Tennyson's  main  argument  in  "  In 
Memoriam."  To  the  insinuation  of  materialism 
Tennyson  retorts  in  effect :  "  Here  am  I  so  made 
that  I  hate  and  shudder  at  your  ideas  ;  and  I 
hold  my  shudder  to  be  an  argument  in  the  case." 
Like  a  man  in  wrath  he  protests ;  and  he  holds 
the  warmth  of  his  wrath  as  evidence  of  the  truth 
of  his  intuition.  Nietzsche  does  no  more  in  the 
saying  I  have  quoted  and  in  hundreds  of  others. 

To  return  to  Arnold's  definition  of  the  poet  as 
a  critic  of  life,  as  one  who  in  his  message  passes 
judgment  upon  the  temper  and  ideals  of  his  time, 
it  is  easy  to  name  that  total  view  of  life,  of 
progress,  of  society,  against  which  Nietzsche 
reacted  with  such  passion  and  fertility  as  to  ensure 
him  a  kind  of  immortality. 

It  was  inevitable  that  the  Western  world  should 
not  go  on  as  it  had  been  going  for  fifty  years, — 
attacking,  amending,  the  traditional  view  of  life 
and  all  things,  producing  in  one  region  its  Renans, 
in  another  its  Darwins,  in  another  its  Schopen- 
hauers ; — it   was   inevitable  that  an  era  of  time 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE     45 

which  had  been  giving  birth  each  year  to  some 
cold  and  careful  analysis  of  a  great  body  of  facts, 
to  some  new  "ology"  or  "onomy,"  "each  a  little 
tinkling-bell  that  signifies  some  faith's  about  to 
die  " ; — it  was  inevitable,  I  say,  that  out  of  that 
vortex  of  challenge  and  disillusionment  there 
should  arise  one  who  should  take  literally  and  as 
his  message  that  dark  result  which  so  much  of  the 
learning  of  the  century  seemed  to  insinuate,  and 
should  summon  men  once  for  all  in  their  actual 
lives  to  proceed  upon  the  frank  negation  of  God. 
It  is  the  nature  of  things  to  move  on  to  their 
proper  crisis  and  catastrophe.  Nietzsche  was  one 
of  those  "  offences  which  needs  must  come."  It 
was  given  to  him  to  see  that  the  denial  of  God 
was  not  the  conclusion  of  the  materialising  pro- 
cess. He  saw  clearly  that  the  denial  of  God  was 
not  the  end,  on  reaching  which  the  ruthless 
intellect  of  man  might  rest.  He  saw  that  it  is 
only  a  new  beginning. 

He  saw  that  if  the  ultimate  denial  was  estab- 
lished, then  it  became  us,  if  we  would  be  self- 
consistent,  to  carry  that  denial  back  and  forward, 
up  and  down,  swinging  it  like  a  sad  lamp  along 
all  the  corridors  of  our  life.  He  saw,  in  fact, 
though  he  did  not  put  it  in  these  words,  that  the 


46  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

materialistic  evolutionary  hypothesis  denies  not 
only  God,  but  man.  Wagner  had  written  The 
Twilight  of  the  Gods;  Nietzsche  wrote  The 
Twilight  of  the  Idols.  And  what  he  meant  was, 
that  if  the  gods  have  gone,  then  the  idols,  who 
are  the  simulacra  of  the  gods,  the  reminiscence 
in  our  moralities  of  the  gods ;  the  pieties,  the 
manners,  the  tendernesses  which  had  their  source 
and  reason  in  the  gods — these  must  also  go. 
This  is  the  meaning  of  his  contempt  for  half-and- 
half  men  like  Strauss  and  Renan.  It  is  the  real 
meaning  of  his  breach  with  Wagner  and  his  later 
preference  for  the  "purely  intellectual  music  of 
Bizet,  wedded  to^  the  dispassionate  prose  of 
Merim^e." 

In  Nietzsche's  view,  Strauss,  Renan,  Wagner 
were  men  who  halted  betwixt  two  opinions,  who 
had  not  the  courage  to  complete  the  syllogism  of 
denial.  Looking  back,  so  far  as  I  am  qualified, 
on  the  literature  of  unbelief  during  our  own  and 
an  earlier  generation,  I  have  the  compassion  for 
Nietzsche  which  we  have  for  Prometheus,  for 
CEdipus,  for  any  tragic  figure  of  literature  or  of 
life,  in  whom  some  error  of  the  human  soul 
greatly  vaunting  itself  receives  the  public  over- 
throw of  God.     Nietzsche  went  mad. 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE     47 

There  is  no  compelling  answer  in  terms  of 
reason  for  any  profound  misapprehension  of  life. 
Life  is  plastic,  indifferent,  capable  to  a  long  length 
of  many  interpretations.  There  is  no  answer 
except  the  test  of  the  experience.  If  a  man  will, 
like  Balaam,  put  aside  those  private  restraints 
which  come  from  the  hard-earned  wisdom  of  the 
human  race,  if  he  will  set  out,  there  is  a  real 
sense  in  which  he  must  set  out.  He  must  be  left 
to  learn  from  the  narrowing  of  the  way  by  which 
he  goes,  and  from  the  behaviour  of  the  beast  on 
which  he  is  riding,  the  delicate  but  inviolable 
nature  of  things.  The  great  weapon  of  truth  is 
time.  We  say,  Solvitur  ambulando ;  we  might 
likewise  say,  Confunditur  ambulando. 

It  is  from  this  point  of  view  alone  that  we 
are  able  to  perceive  the  positive  or  constructive 
element  in  that  mass  of  moral  or  immoral  and  a- 
moral  and  infra-moral  teaching  which  we  all  have 
in  our  minds  when  we  think  of  Nietzsche's  work. 
It  is  from  this  point  of  view  alone  that  we  can  see 
how  we  can  at  all  apply  the  words  "positive  "  and 
"constructive"  to  teaching  which  has  certainly 
the  sound  of  bedlam. 

Nietzsche's  characteristic  teaching  takes  its 
point  of  departure  from  the  blank  pessimism  of 


48  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

Schopenhauer.  There  was  a  time  in  Nietzsche's 
life — rather  a  precise  time ;  it  was  when  he  was 
a  student  at  Bonn, — when  he  quite  decisively 
ceased  to  believe.  So  far  as  I  am  aware,  he 
himself  has  given  us  no  history  of  his  own  spirit 
during  the  transition,  no  account  of  how  it  came 
to  pass  that  one  who  was  the  child  and  grandchild 
of  Lutheran  pastors,  one  who  had  been  cared 
for  by  loving  Christian  women,  should  find 
himself  stripped  of  those  garments  of  the  spirit 
which  it  has  been  such  a  poignant  sorrow  for 
many  another  to  lose.  Nor  can  one  trace  any- 
where in  his  work  any  recollection  of  even  the 
lost  illusions  of  faith.  I  should  infer  that  religion 
with  Nietzsche  had  been  simply  the  acquaintance 
with  a  system  of  rules  and  manners  resting  upon 
a  certain  metaphysic.  This  metaphysic,  it  seemed 
to  him,  had  become  incredible ;  and  with  its 
failure  the  entire  fabric  fell  away  from  him.  I 
cannot  find  in  Nietzsche  any  interval  of  pathos, 
of  hesitation  and  misgiving.  It  would  seem  that 
he  accepted  without  reservation  or  regret  the 
total  denial  and  absence  of  God.  And  with  him 
the  denial  of  God  did  not  simply  mean  the  denial 
of  a  holy  and  loving  guardian  of  our  lives ;  it 
did  not  mean  merely  the  denial,  say,  of  a  future 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE     49 

state,  and  of  "  some  far-off  Divine  event."  With 
him  the  denial  of  God  meant — and  this  I  have 
said  is  to  the  credit  of  his  logic — the  denial  of 
everything  suggestive  of  order  or  sense  or  pur- 
pose in  things :  it  simply  meant  chaos. 

Standing  in  this  "shivered  universe,"  what 
remained  for  him?  It  was  at  this  stage  that 
he  fell  upon  Schopenhauer ;  and  like  a  man  in 
thirst  he  drank  that  goblet  to  the  dregs.  "The 
World  is  Will " ;  that  seemed  to  promise  a  way 
out.  The  world  is  not  to  be  explained  in  terms 
of  reason.  An  explanation  in  terms  of  reason 
leaves  the  door  open  for  the  great  hypothesis  of 
God :  which  must  not  be.  It  may  be  that 
Nietzsche  misunderstood  Schopenhauer,  or,  rather, 
that  he  allowed  himself  to  take  from  Schopen- 
hauer suggestions  to  which  by  his  temperament 
he  was  predestined.  Certainly  he  did  not  rest 
satisfied  with  the  exhortation  or  moral  formula 
which  Schopenhauer  himself  commends  to  those 
who  occupy  his  ground.  For  Schopenhauer's 
recommendation  is  no  more  than  that  we  accept 
our  melancholy  lot ;  do  nothing  to  carry  on  the 
business  ;  and,  if  we  have  opportunity,  deal  gently 
with  one  another  until  death  end  all. 

Now  it  is  by  contrast  with  that  ethic  of 
4 


50  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

Schopenhauer,  which  counsels  man  to  resigna- 
tion and  apathy  and  the  negating  of  life,  that 
Nietzsche's  ethic,  uproarious  and  disorderly  as  it 
is,  is  at  least  positive,  energetic,  robust.  Utterly 
disillusioned,  Schopenhauer  says  in  effect :  "  Let 
be;  let  me  die."  Utterly  disillusioned,  Nietzsche 
says ;  *'  Let  me  live ;  nay,  let  me  kick  my 
heels." 

Here,  then,  let  me,  imperfectly  it  must  be, 
introduce  what,  using  a  term  which  is  becoming 
a  little  overworked  amongst  us,  we  should  call 
his  message,  and  proceed  to  indicate  what,  ac- 
cording to  Nietzsche,  was  his  authority  for  that 
message  both  in  history  and  in  that  nexus  and 
meeting-place  of  instincts,  as  he  might  describe 
our  soul  and  all  we  know. 

It  is  sometimes  objected  to  Nietzsche  that  he 
changed  his  point  of  view  from  time  to  time, 
and  that  doubtless  if  he  had  been  spared  he 
might  have  come  full  circle  back  to  faith.  I  do 
not  find  any  real  change  ;  on  the  contrary,  I  find 
beneath  the  surface,  beneath  the  various  fields  of 
illustration,  an  unbending  persistence  in  one  moral 
category  as  the  imperative,  if  not  for  all  men,  at 
least  for  himself  and  for  all  who  have  ears  to  hear 
him.     It  is  true  that  he  has  a  way  of  picking  the 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE     51 

brains  of  other  men,  taking  what  he  likes  and 
using  it,  out  of  its  original  context,  it  may  be, 
or  with  another  meaning  than  was  originally  in- 
tended. But  perhaps  no  one  of  us  escapes  the 
temptation  to  assimilate  from  our  reading  and 
the  incidents  of  our  life  those  things  which  seem 
to  confirm  and  reinforce  our  abiding  interest. 
So  it  was  with  Nietzsche.  He  took  up  Schopen- 
hauer, thanking  him  for  the  category  of  "the 
world  as  will,"  thanking  him,  i.e.,  for  the  sug- 
gestion of  some  principle  other  than  that  of 
Reasonable  Consistency,  by  the  help  of  which  he 
could  look  out  upon  the  world.  But  he  did  not 
accept  Schopenhauer's  ethical  conclusions ;  nor 
indeed  did  he  accept  his  understanding  of  **  Will." 
"Will"  became  in  Nietzsche's  hands  simply 
desire,  impulse,  caprice,  appetite,  anything  at  all 
that  moved  himself. 

In  the  same  way  he  took  up  Darwinism,  as  a 
working  theory  of  the  origin  of  man,  so  long  as 
he  needed  illustrations  of  man's  primitive  de- 
gradation. But  the  moment  his  keen  eye  de- 
tected the  innuendo  in  Darwinism,  that  a  being 
like  man  who  had  come  thus  far,  and  from  such 
a  lowly  place,  might  after  all  have  within  him  a 
protesting  and  indestructible  quality  which  would 


52  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

yet  compel  him  upwards  even  to  perfection,  at 
that  moment  he  dropped  Darwinism  as  a  system. 
This  forsaking  of  philosophies  and  breaking-off 
of  friendships  with  men  gives  ground  for  thinking 
that  Nietzsche  did  not  know  his  own  mind.  But 
the  opposite  is  the  truth.  He  knew  his  own 
mind,  and  held  to  it  so  obstinately  that  he 
did  not  permit  any  old  love  to  check  his  utter- 
ance. 

I  find  in  his  earliest  work,  The  Birth  of 
Tragedy  out  of  the  Spirit  of  Music,  the  funda- 
mental principle  of  all  his  subsequent  teaching, 
the  insight  which  he  permitted  to  carry  him 
wherever  it  would. 

Let  us  dwell  for  a  moment  upon  the  thesis  of 
that  work.  If  I  can  isolate  it  and  make  it  clear, 
I  think  we  shall  have  the  key  to  the  understand- 
ing of  all  his  characteristic  words  and  phrases  like 
"The  Will  to  Live"  and  "The  Will  to  Power," 
"  The  Superman,"  "  Master-morality  "and  "  Slave- 
morality,"  "The  Transvaluation  of  all  Values" 
and  "  Eternal  Recurrence."  And  I  can  already 
perceive  that  this  paper  will  not  be  able  to 
accomplish  more  than  to  illustrate  his  application 
here  and  there  of  the  principle  on  which  he  seized 
in    that  first    book  of    his.     I   quote   from   the 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE     53 

epitome  of  one  of  his  latest  commentators,  Dr. 
Miigge. 

"There  are  two  instincts,  two  states  of  the  human  mind — 
the  Apollonian  and  the  Dionysean.  On  these  two  physical 
dispositions  depend  all  the  developments  of  Art ;  for  ApoUonism 
and  Dionysism  are  the  pure  and  direct  states  of  Art.  The 
Apollonian  instinct  is  a  sort  of  dream  of  beauty :  the  Dionysean 
instinct  is  a  kind  of  intoxication  resulting  from  the  delight 
of  mere  existence.  The  'principium  individuationis '  of 
Schopenhauer  and  the  god  Apollo  with  his  sunny  eyes :  these 
convey  to  us  the  idea  of  the  former.  The  Dionysean  impulses 
of  spring,  of  the  St.  Vitus'  dancers  of  the  middle-ages,  the 
conception  of  the  music  of  the  world :  these  convey  to  us  an 
idea  of  the  latter.  The  art  and  the  civilisation  of  Greece  were 
originally  Apollonian;  it  was  a  beautiful  visionary  world  and 
moderation  was  its  axiom.  Later  on  the  Dionysean  instinct 
became  united  with  the  Apollonian,  and  together  they  gave 
rise  to  the  greatest  works  of  art.  For  example,  in  a  popular 
song,  melody  is  the  most  important  part.  All  music  has  a 
Dionysean  character;  for,  being  pure  will,  it  symbolises  a 
realm  beyond  all  forms  of  visible  manifestation.  Under  the 
influence  of  this  mysterious  Dionysean  state  of  music,  the 
Apollonian  instinct  in  the  lyric  poet  comes  to  life,  first  as  a 
visionary  conception.  Thus  Schiller  mentions  a  'musical 
sentiment '  as  always  preceding  the  composition  of  his  poems  " 
(as  our  own  Burns  wrote  his  songs  to  music  that  was  already 
singing  in  his  ear)  "...  Greek  tragedy  developed  itself  out 
of  the  tragic-choir,  the  satyr-choir.  Tragedy  was  born  of  the 
spirit  of  music.  To  the  Greek,  the  satyr  was  an  expression 
of  the  longing  for  freedom,  for  a  return  to  nature ;  a  longing 
strengthened  by  the  artificiality  of  the  Apollonian  instinct.  .  .  . 

"To  the  mind  of  the  Greek,  the  satyr  bore  the  stamp 
of  primitive  man,  possessing  all  the  highest  and  strongest 
emotions.  .  .  ,  The  effect  of  the  Dionysean  tragedy  is,  that 


54  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

State  and  Society  and  in  general  all  the  depths  between  man 
and  man,  yield  to  an  overwhelming  feeling  of  unity  and  oneness 
which  leads  back  to  the  heart  of  nature.  The  metaphysical 
consolation  with  which  every  good  tragedy  dismisses  us  is 
this,  that  Life  which  is  at  the  heart  of  all  things  is,  in  spite  of 
its  different  manifestations,  for  ever  indestructible,  powerful, 
joyous.  What  then  was  Dionysus  ?  He  was  a  Power  excelling 
the  Vine-Spirit  and  far  more  ancient.  He  was  the  'will  to 
live,'  and  it  is  by  that  inexhaustible  fountain  and  torrent  of 
energy,  expressing  itself  in  motion  and  emotion,  in  frenzied 
music,  in  ecstasy,  in  abandonment  to  impulses,  it  is  on  that 
tide  only  that  man  lives  when  he  may  be  said  to  live  at  all." 

I  am,  of  course,  unable  to  say  whether  Nietzsche 
is  justified  in  his  account  of  the  origin  of  tragedy. 
He  was,  it  is  acknowledged,  well  equipped  for 
dealing  with  Greek  literature,  and  commentators 
who  have  nothing  but  abhorrence  for  his  moral 
teaching,  have  admitted  the  depth  and  originality 
of  his  observation.  In  effect  it  may  well  have 
been  as  he  says,  that  it  was  the  inrushing  of  some 
primitive  and  irrational  Force  which  fertilised  the 
soul  of  Greece  at  a  particular  moment  in  her 
history.  It  may  also  be  true  that  the  history  of 
man  is  the  alternating  domination  of  Dionysus 
and  Apollo.  Emerson  reversed  the  order  when 
he  said  that  all  great  epochs,  epochs  of  abnormal 
mental  activity,  occur  at  the  moment  when  a 
nation  is  passing  out  of  its  barbarism ;  holding, 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE      55 

therefore,  that  it  was  not  the  inrushing  of  Dionysus 
which  gave  birth  to  music  and  the  tragic  emotion, 
but  rather  the  appearance  in  the  midst  of  life's 
exuberance  of  Apollo  the  lord  of  measure ;  that 
it  was  the  pressure  of  thought,  the  strain  of  a 
coming  contradiction,  which,  harnessing  in  the 
wild  steeds  of  passion,  introduced  the  human  soul 
to  its  greatness.  And  certainly  on  an  appeal  to 
experience,  either  to  our  own  experience  or  to 
the  classical  autobiographies  of  the  soul,  a  strong 
case  could  be  stated  for  the  view  that  it  is  not  the 
inrush  of  the  Dionysean  spirit,  but  the  approach 
of  the  shadow  of  Apollo  which  makes  for  life  and 
fullness.  The  natural  man  within  each  of  us  is, 
I  suppose,  still  the  primitive  man ;  but  is  it  not 
our  experience  that  even  that  natural  man  within 
us  does  not  get  his  true  play  and  freedom  until 
he  is  forced  back  into  the  second  place  under  the 
dominion  of  some  spiritual  purpose.-*  The  one 
proof  that  untrammelled  naturalism  is  not  the 
proper  life  of  man  is  simply  this,  that  he  cannot 
go  on  with  it.  The  one  thing  we  yearn  for,  as 
deeply  as  we  yearn  for  freedom,  is  for  bondage. 
A  man  may  easily  become  more  natural  than  it  is 
natural  for  him  to  be. 

I  can  recall  many  a  great  passage  in  Tolstoy — 


$6  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

great  for  its  absolute  fidelity  to  the  things  of  the 
soul — in  which  the  converse  to  Nietzsche's  thesis 
is  illustrated,  in  which  "natural  men"  like 
Olenine  in  TAe  Cossacks,  Levin  in  Anna  Karenina, 
Prince  Andrei  in  War  and  Peace^  and  Nekhludoff 
in  Resurrection^  come  upon  life,  upon  their  own 
proper  vitality,  not  when  they  are  letting  them- 
selves go,  but  when  for  the  first  time  they  come 
within  the  shadow  of  life's  holier  meanings. 

However  these  things  may  be,  and  without 
going  more  deeply  into  the  matter,  there  are 
these  two  main  spirits  in  life — call  them  Dionysus 
and  Apollo,  The  Flesh  and  the  Spirit,  Love  and 
Law,  Impulse  and  Reflection,  Life  and  Reason — 
we  might  even  say  Faith  and  Experience ;  and 
the  crises  in  history  do  come  when,  after  the  long 
tyranny  of  one  of  these  spirits,  the  other,  equally 
indestructible,  throws  off  the  yoke. 

What  all  this  meant  for  Nietzsche  was,  that 
Dionysus  was  "the  lord  of  life,  that  man's  true 
health  and  well-being  lay,  not  in  thought  but 
simply  in  life  itself,  and  simply  in  that  life  of 
instinct,  of  innocence  (he  calls  it),  in  which  he 
yields  to  impulse  without  reflection  or  misgiving. 
Now,  once  more,  it  was  never  Nietzsche's  way  to 
hold  himself  bound  by  any  formula,  even  though 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE     57 

it  had  been  his  own.  And  if  the  Dionysus- 
Apollo  insight  into  man's  nature  had  begun  to 
present  difficulties  or  to  suggest  modifications,  he 
would  simply  have  dropped  it  as  he  dropped 
Schopenhauer  and  Darwin  and  Wagner,  bearing 
off  with  him  the  one  idea  to  which  indeed  he 
had  been  predisposed.  There  is  evidence  that 
Nietzsche  was  aware  of  certain  implications  in  his 
own  interpretation  of  the  great  Greek  period, 
which  must  qualify  the  headlongness  of  his  pro- 
positions. And  there  is  evidence  that  he  did  pay 
heed  to  them,  notably  in  his  own  greatest  book, 
I  mean,  Thus  Spake  Zarathustra.  For  example, 
let  any  worldly-minded  person  begin  by  hailing 
Nietzsche  as  his  particular  moral  guide.  Let  him 
begin  by  quoting  Nietzsche  in  order  to  justify  his 
own  riotousness.  If  he  is  loyal  even  to  such  a 
master,  Nietzsche  will  presently  begin  to  make 
proposals  to  that  man  which  will,  from  his  own 
point  of  view,  be  as  severe  and  thwarting  as  would 
be  the  ethics  of  the  Church. 

"Oh,  that  ye  would  understand  my  word.  Be  sure  to  do 
whatever  ye  like — only  first  of  all  be  such  as  can  will." 

"  This  new  command,  O  my  brethren,  I  give  unto  you : 
Become  hard." 

"  Die  proudly,  when  it  is  no  longer  possible  to  live  proudly." 

"  What  is  freedom  ?    The  will  to  be  responsible  for  one's 


58  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

self;  the  maintaining  of  the  distance  that  separates  man  from 
man ;  becoming  indifferent  to  trouble,  severity,  privation,  and 
even  to  life;  being  ready  to  sacrifice  people  to  one's  cause, 
not  even  excepting  thyself." 

The  one  idea  which  Nietzsche  carried  away 
with  him  from  his  philological  studies  was  the 
idea  that  the  true  sign  of  that  which  is  good  is 
strength,  fullness,  spontaneity  ;  and  following  upon 
that,  that  any  manner  of  restriction  was  of  the 
devil.  This  is  the  rallying-point,  the  nexus  of  all 
his  subsequent  teaching : 

"  Egoism  is  of  the  Essence  of  all  noble  souls." 
"  The  senses  do  not  deceive  us,  .  .  .  at  present,  we  possess 
knowledge  only  to  the  extent  of  our  resolution  to  accept  the 
testimony  of  the  senses.  The  rest  is  abortion,  and  incomplete 
knowledge,  i.e.  metaphysics,  divinity,  psychology,  and  the 
theory  of  perception,  or  formal  science, — sciences  of  symbols, 
as  logic,  and  that  applied  form  of  logic — metaphysics. 
Actuality  is  never  met  with  in  those  sciences." 

"  All  old-morality  monsters,  and  especially  Christianity,  have 
waged  war  against  the  passions  with  a  view  to  exterminating 
them.     The  praxis  of  the  church  is  inimical  to  life." 

•  In  Nietzsche's  view  Socrates  contributed 
largely  to  the  sadness,  and  finally  to  the  over- 
throw, of  Greece.  Through  him  largely  it  came 
about  that  the  "native  hue  of  resolution  was 
sicklied  o'er  with  the  pale  cast  of  thought." 

"Opinions  and  valuations  with  regard  to  life  either  for  or 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE      59 

against  can  never  in  the  end  be  true :  they  only  possess  value 
as  symptoms." 

"  Socrates,  according  to  his  descent,  belonged  to  the  lowest 
of  the  people :  Socrates  was  of  the  proletariat.  He  was  ugly. 
Ugliness,  while  in  itself  an  objection,  is  almost  a  refutation 
when  found  among  Greeks."  "  Often  enough  ugliness  is  the 
expression  of  a  thwarted  development.  .  .  .  The  typical 
criminal  is  ugly  and  decadent." 

"  Previous  to  the  time  of  Socrates,  dialectic  methods  were 
repudiated  in  good  society.  We  employ  dialectics  only  when 
we  have  no  other  means." 

"The  dialectician  merely  leaves  it  to  his  opponent  to 
demonstrate  that  he  is  not  an  idiot,  thus  making  him  furious 
and  at  the  same  time  helpless." 

"As  long  as  life  is  in  the  ascendant,  happiness  is  identical 
with  instinct;  to  be  forced  to  combat  the  instincts, — that  is 
the  formula  of  decadence."  "  Socrates,  the  chronic  valetudin- 
arian, was  a  mistake.  The  whole  of  improving  morality, 
including  Christian  morality,  has  been  a  mistake.  It  has  all 
been  decadence  under  another  name." 

"  I  mistrust  all  systematisers  and  avoid  them.  The  desire 
for  system  is  a  lack  of  rectitude." 

"Convictions  are  prisons.  A  man  who  believes,  becomes 
dependent  and  cannot  be  upright." 

And  so  on  and  on. 

This,  of  course,  is  all  very  well,  but  it  means 
what  I  meant  when  I  said  that  thoroughgoing 
materialism  not  only  does  away  with  God,  but 
does  away  with  man.  This  is  to  do  away  with 
man.  Is  not  society,  to  which,  after  all,  we  owe 
everything,  is  not  society  the  attempt  to  arrive  at 


6o  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

a  compromise  between  the  free  play  of  instincts 
and  the  absolute  restriction  of  instincts?  It  is 
obvious  that  we  cannot  all  of  us  at  every  moment 
of  our  existence  get  up  and  speak,  or  walk  out,  or 
knock  one  another  over.  In  order  to  play  a  game 
even,  one  must  observe  rules.  Even  in  order  to 
be  funny  one  must  have  a  kind  of  solemn  back- 
ground. In  order  to  be  a  Nietzschean  one  must 
have  a  contrast  in  the  general  orderliness  of 
the  people.  To  take  the  kind  of  header  that 
Nietzsche  recommends,  one  must  have  a  jump- 
ing-board  of  patient  backs.  "  When  everybody's 
wearing  tweed,  up  goes  the  price  of  shoddy ; 
when  everybody's  somebody,  then  nobody's  any- 
body." 

A  Nietzschean  requires  spectators  who  are  not 
Nietzscheans. 

Originally  it  may  very  well  have  been  that 
people  were  left-handed  or  right-handed  as  they 
pleased.  But  the  moment  they  came  together  in 
communities,  they  were  compelled  to  come  to  a 
decision.  Otherwise,  if  each  man,  that  is  to  say, 
in  using  the  scythe  had  taken  his  own  way,  they 
would  all  have  hacked  off  each  other's  legs.  The 
left-handedness  of  a  tribesman  of  Benjamin  must 
have  been  a  disadvantage  to  him  when  he  went 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE     6i 

abroad.  Nietzsche  is  an  advocate  of  left-handed- 
ness  in  morals,  appearing  in  a  world  which  for 
good  or  evil  has  decided  to  use  its  right  hand. 

There  is  no  need  for  me  to  deal  dialectically 
with  this  part  of  Nietzsche's  teaching :  that  has 
been  done  once  for  all  by  Plato  in  his  treatment 
of  Thrasymachus  in  the  First  Book  of  the 
Republic,  and  in  his  criticism  of  Callicles  in 
the  Gorgias.  This  being  so,  I  should  regret 
that  I  had  laboured  the  obvious  difficulties  which 
beset  an  unbridled  individualism,  only  that  the 
quotations  from  Nietzsche,  which  I  made  a 
moment  ago,  and  my  comment  and  illustration, 
have  had  the  good  effect  of  carrying  me  on  to  a 
later  stage  of  the  man's  teaching.  And  here  I 
shall  increase  my  own  pace  and  take  a  short  cut 
towards  my  conclusion. 

It  is  not  to  be  supposed  that  Nietzsche  was 
not  aware  of  the  embarrassments  of  his  own 
theory :  he  was  aware  of  them,  as  being  within 
the  theory  itself  and  also  within  these  institutions 
of  the  spirit,  systems  of  philosophy,  of  ethics, 
manners,  customs,  proverbs,  and  above  all  within 
the  Christian  tradition  which  had  had  dominion 
over  man  for  so  long,  and  still  more  or  less 
occupied  the  field. 


62  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

It  is  evidence  to  me  that  Nietzsche  became 
aware  of  the  difficulties  in  his  own  Dionysean 
maxims,  —  that  I  detect  a  steadily  increasing 
severity,  and  (in  spite  of  himself)  a  groping  after 
system,  in  his  subsequent  books.  He  sees  that, 
without  the  pressure  of  the  Apollonian  spirit, 
Dionysism  is  mere  riotousness,  ending  in  melan- 
choly and  ennui. 

Nietzsche's  total  burden  and  protest  is :  to 
oppose  with  every  weapon  of  irony,  laughter, 
argument,  contempt,  all  the  current  fashion  of 
liberty,  democracy,  socialism,  pity,  and  equality. 
For  him  there  are  two  orders  of  men  :  there  are 
masters  and  there  are  slaves.  That,  he  says,  is 
the  ordinance  of  nature ;  and  here  he  annexes 
the  whole  literature  of  "natural  law  in  the 
spiritual  world "  in  a  way  which  would  have 
greatly  amazed  some  of  its  genial  advocates 
amongst  ourselves. 

"  Ye  preachers  of  equality,  ye  are  tarantulse.  Therefore  do 
I  tear  your  web,  that  your  revenge  may  leap  forth  from  behind 
your  word  'justice.'  'Will  unto  Equality,'  they  say  shall 
henceforth  be  the  name  of  virtue,  and  they  clamour  against 
everything  that  hath  power.  O  ye  preachers  of  equality,  the 
tyrant- frenzy  of  Impotence.  Your  most  secret  tyrant-longings 
cry  thus  in  you  for  '  equality.*  Fretted  conceit  and  suppressed 
envy  thus  break  out  in  you.  Nay,  friends;  distrust  all  in 
whom  the  impulse  to  punish  is  powerful,  and  who  talk  much 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE     63 

of  their  justice.  Unto  me,  Justice  saith :  Men  are  not  equal : 
neither  shall  they  become  so.  Life  is  a  struggle  to  rise,  and 
to  surmount  itself.  Divinely  will  we  strive  against  each  other. 
"  He  who  is  of  my  type  cannot  escape  the  hour  which  saith 
unto  him :  Now  go  thou  only  the  way  of  thy  greatness.  Life 
is  that  which  must  ever  surpass  itself." 

He  is  aware,  too, — and,  indeed,  the  theory 
involves  it,  —  that  there  are  those  who  will 
respond  to  his  summons  and  those  who  will  not. 
He  is  not  anxious  to  make  proselytes ;  they  must 
come  only  if  they  are  called.  And  if  they  obey, 
it  is  to  no  easy  life  he  summons  them.  For  by 
this  time  Zarathustra  also  has  so  far  conformed 
to  all  ethical  codes,  that  he  too  announces  9 
motive  for  his  master-man.  In  this  world  wherein 
no  Divine  or  resolute  meaning  is  to  be  found, 
what  are  these  master-men  to  live  for  ?  To  what 
light  are  they  to  lift  up  their  faces  in  the  intervals 
of  reaction  or  misgiving  ?  For  Zarathustra  also 
has  now  come  so  far  towards  normal  manhood 
that  he  confesses  to  great  loneliness  at  times,  and 
sorrow  and  bitterness : 

**  Oh,  loneliness,  my  home-loneliness !  Among  the  many 
I  felt  forsaken.  To  feel  forsaken  is  one  thing :  to  feel  lonely 
is  another.     O  human  kind,  how  strange  thou  art ! " 

What,  then,  is  the  star  for  this  elect  spirit  in  a 


64  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

degraded  world  ?     Not  mere  Dionysism  :    Zara- 
thustra  is  beyond  that  now. 

"If  ye  had  more  belief  in  life,  ye  would  yield  yourselves 
less  to  the  impulse  of  the  moment" 

Not  mere  joy  or  animalism. 

"  Creating — that  is  the  great  salvation  from  suffering,  and 
life's  alleviation."  "Let  yourself  be  in  your  action  as  the 
mother  is  in  the  child."     "  Man  is  not  a  goal,  but  a  bridge." 

And  a  bridge  to  what?  He  is  a  bridge 
between  the  animal  and  the  Superman. 

"  Let  us  build.  On  the  tree  of  the  future  we  will  build  our 
nest.     The  eagles  shall  bring  us  food.  ..." 

"Man  shall  be  educated  for  war,  and  woman  for  the 
recreation  of  the  warrior.  Let  women  be  a  joy,  pure  and  fine 
like  a  precious  jewel,  illumined  with  the  virtues  of  a  world  not 
yet  come.  Let  the  beam  of  a  star  shine  in  your  love.  Let 
your  hope  say :  '  May  I  bear  the  superman.'  Marriage, — so 
call  I  the  will  of  the  twain  to  create  the  one  that  is  more  than 
those  who  created  it.  But  that  which  the  far-too-many  call 
marriage  is  one  long  stupidity.  Even  your  best  love  is  but 
a  torch  to  guide  you  unto  loftier  paths.  ..." 

"  A  great  horror  to  us  is  the  degenerating  sense  which  says : 
*  All  for  myself.'  Upward  soareth  our  sense ;  the  body  goeth 
through  history, — growing  and  fighting.  And  the  spirit — what 
is  it  unto  the  body  ?  The  herald,  companion,  and  echo  of  its 
fights  and  victories."  ..."  Man  hath  been  only  an  attempt. 
We  fight  step  by  step  with  the  giant.  Chance.  There  are  a 
thousand  paths  which  have  never  yet  been  trodden.  Arise, 
ye  lonesome  ones,  one  day  shall  ye  be  a  people.  Out  of  you  a 
chosen  people  shall  arise ;  and  out  of  it  the  Superman."  .  .  . 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE     65 

"  I  love  only  the  land  of  my  children."  ..."  Only  the  day 
after  to-morrow  is  mine." 

He  is  equally  alive  to  the  opposition  which  his 
message  will  encounter  from  everything  that  is 
ancient  and  experienced  in  the  institutions  of  the 
people,  from  civilisation,  from  the  traditional 
pieties  of  life,  and  especially  from  Christianity, 
so  far  as  it  sanctions  the  existing  state  of 
things. 

Here,  had  I  made  a  more  economical  use  of 
my  time,  I  should  have  dealt  with  Nietzsche's 
breach  with  Wagner,  not  only  for  the  sake  of 
the  matter  at  issue,  but  as  making  clear  the 
nature  and  depth  of  his  divergence  from  Chris- 
tianity. 

I  know  no  words  about  music  and  about  the 
music  of  Wagner,  so  luminous,  so  exact  and 
convincing,  as  those  which  Nietzsche  knows  how 
to  make  use  of.  He  can  make  plain  to  our 
reason  things  so  intangible  that  we  ourselves 
should  scarcely  have  known  them,  or  known 
that  we  had  felt  them.  His  words  have  the 
effect  of  helping  us  to  identify  our  own  souls, 
of  helping  us  to  retain  in  our  memory — because 
he  has  caught  them  in  some  phrase — images  and 
impressions  which  would  otherwise  have  died,  so 
5 


66  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

far  as  things  may  be  said  to  die,  with  the  actual 
moment. 

"  With  Wagner  we  scale  the  most  elevated  peaks  of  feeling, 
and  it  is  only  there  that  we  feel  ourselves  brought  back  to 
Nature's  boundless  heart,  into  the  realm  of  liberty.  There 
we  see  ourselves  and  our  fellows  emerge  as  something  sublime 
from  an  immense  mirage,  if  I  may  call  it  so :  we  see  the 
deep  meaning  in  our  struggles,  in  our  victory  and  our  defeat. 
Changed  thus  into  tragic  men,  we  return  again  to  life  in  a 
strangely  consoled  mood.  .  .  .  The  trouble  and  proud  wonder 
which  an  artist  experiences  with  regard  to  the  world  are  united 
to  an  ardent  desire  to  embrace  the  same  world  in  love." 

And  yet,  soon  afterwards,  the  man  who  wrote 
such  words  could  write  these  : 

"Wagner  has  been  ruinous  to  music.  Was  Wagner  a 
musician  at  all  ?  He  was  at  least  something  else  in  a  higher 
degree,  i.e.  an  unsurpassable  actor.  .  .  .  Even  I  was  at  first 
fascinated  by  him,  but  it  was  a  mistake  on  my  part.  I  freed 
myself  from  him,  though  it  caused  me  much  suffering.  .  .  . 
Wagner  is  a  Romanist,  and  he  made  the  poor  Devil,  the 
country  lad,  Parsifal,  a  Roman  Catholic.  I  despise  everyone 
who  does  not  regard  Parsifal  as  an  outrage  in  morals." 

You  get  at  the  secret  of  this  sudden  aversion  if 
you  listen  to  another  quotation  : 

"In  Wagner's  works,"  says  Nietzsche,  "there  is  always 
someone  who  wants  to  be  saved." 

That's  it.     The  conflict  between  Nietzsche  and 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE     67 

Wagner  was  reproduced — the  personalities  being 
smaller — in  the  conflict,  some  years  ago,  between 
W.  E.  Henley  and  Robert  Louis  Stevenson. 
Henley  could  not  understand  how  an  erect  and 
strenuous  spirit  like  Stevenson  could  have  his 
hankering  after  forgiveness.  He  called  Stevenson 
"  The  Shorter  Catechist."  It  seemed  to  him 
unmanly,  weak,  cringing,  cowardly, — precisely 
the  words  which  Nietzsche  uses  of  Wagner.  The 
fact  is,  Nietzsche  did  not  understand  Christianity  ; 
and  nowhere  did  he  show  himself  less  capable 
congenitally  of  understanding  Christianity  than 
in  his  misapprehension  of  the  nature  of  Christian 
forgiveness.  I  am  not  saying  that  the  Church 
had  altogether  in  his  day  (or  in  ours)  guarded 
herself  sufficiently  against  the  imputation  of 
antinomianism  and  sentimentalism.  But  it  ought 
not  to  have  been  beyond  Nietzsche's  penetration 
to  see  that  the  cry  for  forgiveness  is  in  many  ways 
very  like  his  own  purest  cries  for  personal  freedom  ; 
that  the  cry  for  pardon  is  in  one  respect  the  pro- 
test of  a  man,  in  the  name  of  what  he  believes  to 
be  his  essential  nature,  against  that  lower  ex- 
pression of  himself  which  he  sees  in  his  moral 
failures.  Adopting  Nietzsche's  own  jargon,  I 
should  say  that,  occupying  the  place  that  it  does 


68  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

in  the  Christian  scheme,  forgiveness,  the  definite 
pardon  by  God,  the  new  right  to  lift  up  our  head 
again,  though  we  have  been  what  we  have  been, 
and  the  consequent  inrush  of  a  new  and  whole- 
some vitality — ^all  that  is  the  confirmation  by 
Christianity  of  everything  that  was  true  in 
Nietzsche's  analysis  of  the  soul. 

I  find,  as  is  usual  in  a  paper  in  which  one 
simply  writes  on  and  on,  that  I  have  arrived  at 
what  must  be  the  limit  of  my  space  without 
having  said  the  very  things  which  were  most  emi- 
nently in  my  mind  when  I  began.  I  had  hoped,  for 
example,  to  ask  myself  how  serious  men  ought  to 
deal  with  this  spirit, — which,  not  always  traceable 
to  Nietzsche,  has  its  flagrant  apostles  amongst 
us, — so  as  to  absorb  and  obey  what  is  signifi- 
cant and  organic  to  the  enduring  soul  of 
man. 

I  definitely  close  with  one  remark  ;  let  us  make 
of  it  what  we  may.  It  is  this  :  I  cannot  fin3  the 
trace  of  any  thoroughly  good  man  or  woman,  of 
any  person  having  first-rate  ability  and  a  grace  of 
Christian  character  to  match  it,  with  whom  poor 
Nietzsche  ever  came  into  contact.  He  knows 
only  the  hypocrisies  and  frauds  and  disingenu- 
ousnesses  of  Christianity.     He    knows  only  its 


THE  CRY  FOR  FREEDOM— NIETZSCHE     69 

greed   of  power,    of  physical    influence,    of  sus- 
picion. 

"  It  is  the  shrewdness  of  Christianity,"  he  says,  "  that  men 
talk  about  their  beliefs,  but  they  obey  their  instincts." 

And  so,  when,  as  it  seemed  to  him,  the  meta- 
physic  of  Christianity  gave  way,  there  were  no 
tender  memories,  no  dear  ties,  no  cautionary 
examples  to  restrain  him,  and  it  might  be  to  save 
him. 

"  A  philosophy  " — and  the  same  is  true  of  a  personal  faith — 
"which  we  accept  out  of  pure  intellect,  will  never  become 
quite  our  own,  because  it  never  was  our  own." 

Those  are  his  words.     They  are  true. 

And  one  of  the  ties  deeper  than  reason  which 
binds  men  to  religious  beliefs  will  always  be  the 
quite  evident  happiness  and  unworldliness  of  those 
who  profess  such  a  belief.  Nietzsche,  in  his  own 
bitter  way,  once  proposed  for  himself  a  thesis  on 
which  he  should  write.     The  subject  was  to  be : 

"  What  is  the  nature  of  the  kinship  or  contrast  between  a 
man  like  Tischendorf,  who  had  examined  and  judged  over  two 
hundred  manuscripts,  dating  from  before  the  ninth  century — 
a  man  cunning  and  diplomatic,  fanatical,  frivolous,  ever  so 
sharpsighted  in  his  own  department,  painfully  exact  in  publica- 
tion, vain  beyond  all  bounds,  greedy  of  gain,  defensor  fidei^ 
a  courtier  and  a  speculator  in  the  book-market — what  is  the 


70  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

nature  of  the  kinship  or  contrast  between  such  a  man  and  the 
writers  of  the  New  Testament  with  the  Sinaitic  recension  of 
which  his  name  will  be  for  ever  associated  ?  " 

We  are  all  responsible  for  one  another  ;  and 
the  Church  of  every  age  is  responsible  if  not 
for  the  general  atmosphere,  at  least  for  its  own 
atmosphere.  And  perhaps  something  different 
might  have  come  of  Nietzsche.  There  was  a 
tender  spot  in  a  soul,  and  a  capacity  for  a  high 
fidelity,  who  could  write  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth  as 
Nietzsche  did  write  (if  I  have  caught  the  tone  of 
his  voice) : 

"There  has  been  only  one  Christian,  and  He  died  upon 
the  Cross." 

I  might  here  take  a  deep  breath  and  say, 
adopting  for  one  moment  the  Carlylean,  accidental 
view  of  history,  that  it  is  in  consequence  of 
Nietzsche's  utter  misunderstanding  of  Christianity 
and  scorn  for  its  words  and  ideas  and  personalities, 
that  Europe  to-day  is  one  battlefield. 


IV 

THE  CRY  FOR  CONTROL— TRACTARIANISM 

IN  order  to  feel  absolutely  free,  I  shall  not 
begin  with  a  definition  of  my  subject. 
"  Tractarianism  "  I  shall  take  to  mean  the  whole 
business  with  which  I  shall  have  been  dealing  in 
the  course  of  this  paper.  I  shall  take  it  to  mean 
the  entire  body  of  ideas  and  points  of  view  which 
are  let  loose  in  the  mind  of  an  intelligent  man 
by  that  movement  associated  with  the  name  and 
personality  and  career  of  John  Henry  Newman. 

In  this  paper  I  shall  attempt  no  criticism  of  a 
formal  kind.  I  have  indulged  my  hostility  to  the 
whole  movement  elsewhere,  and  have  said  what 
it  then  occurred  to  me  to  say  by  way  of  meeting 
Newman's  chief  positions.  I  felt  then,  and  I  feel 
more  powerfully  now,  that  such  a  movement  as 
Tractarianism  deserves  something  more  than 
criticism  or  hostility.  And  most  of  the  men  who 
have  set  themselves  to  disparage  the  Tractarians 

7» 


72  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

on  the  philosophical  or  historical  plane,  admirable 
and  fierce  as  their  work  has  been,  simply  demon- 
strate to  me  that  they  themselves  were  congenitally 
and  it  may  even  be  from  all  eternity  disqualified 
for  the  task.  A  movement  may  have  attained 
such  proportions  and  have  been  the  instrument 
of  such  blessings  and  powers  to  innumerable 
souls,  that  to  say  that  it  all  rested  upon  an  error 
may  even  be  to  impugn  the  Divine  control  of  the 
world.  The  first  thing  that  a  man  has  got  to 
face  in  dealing  with  this  movement,  or  with  any 
movement  in  the  same  unworldly  region,  which 
has  attained  a  like  volume  and  power — is  the  fact 
that  it  all  happened.  If  you  demonstrate  to  me 
with  mathematical  precision  that  it  ought  not 
to  have  happened,  then  I  can  only  retort  that 
obviously  in  this  world  there  is  an  order  of  things 
which  is  not  amenable  to  your  mathematical 
vetoes.  In  fact,  a  man  who  sets  himself  to  show 
that  first  and  last  and  all  along  the  line  a  move- 
ment proceeded  in  defiance  of  certain  facts  and 
rules  and  laws  which  are  patent  to  all  the  moment 
you  consider,  only  heightens  the  wonder,  and, 
for  me,  only  increases  the  authenticity  of  such  a 
movement.  His  argument  really  is  on  all  fours 
with  the  sophism  of  Achilles  and   the   tortoise. 


THE  CRY  FOR  CONTROL— TRACTARIANISM  73 

On  a  certain  conception  of  space,  namely,  that  it 
consists  of  an  infinite  number  of  contiguous  points, 
it  can  be  demonstrated  that  Achilles  can  never 
overtake  the  tortoise :  just  as  it  can  be  shown  on 
the  same  postulate  that  the  minute-hand  of  my 
watch  can  never  reach  the  next  five  minutes' 
space.  But  we  know  that  Achilles  could  over- 
take the  tortoise,  and  that  the  minute-hand  of  my 
watch  will  reach  that  impossible  place — and  this, 
finally,  for  the  same  reason  as  led  to  Tractarianism 
in  spite  of  all  kinds  of  rationalism,  namely,  because 
the  human  reason,  in  dealing  with  anything  that 
lives  and  moves  has  no  function  except,  first  to 
look  on  and  afterwards  to  consider  and  under- 
stand. The  mere  intellect,  as  Bergson  has  been 
the  last  to  say,  though  he  was  not  the  first,  is 
distinguished  by  an  utter  incapacity  to  deal  with 
reality. 

Any  movement  so  general,  so  cordial,  so  happy 
and  triumphant  in  the  experience  of  those  who 
have  flung  in  their  lot  with  it,  any  movement 
which,  as  we  see  from  this  distance,  has  come  to 
occupy  such  a  place  and  to  affect  its  surroundings, 
as  it  has  beyond  all  question  done,  is  a  move- 
ment in  my  view  which  was  inevitable  and 
according  to  the  will  of  God.     That  is  to  say,  it 


74  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

must  have  arisen  out  of  the  necessities  of  the  case, 
and  must  have  had  allies  in  the  true  and  abiding 
spirit  of  man.  It  will  not  do  to  explain  it  away 
by  such  a  sa,ying  as  had  vogue  for  a  time,  a 
saying  which  I  have  always  thought  the  height 
of  absurdity,  namely,  that  had  Newman  known 
German,  there  would  have  been  no  Oxford  move- 
ment. People  who  say  such  a  thing  hold  a 
different  view  from  mine  of  human  history.  But 
surely  we  do  not  live  in  such  a  haphazard  and 
precarious  world.  To  make  a  tremendous  con- 
sequence hang  exclusively  upon  some  thread  of 
chance  is  surely  to  come  near  to  Atheism.  The 
converse  might  with  more  reason  be  urged.  It 
may  be  the  true  explanation  of  everything  to  say 
that  Providence,  or  Fate,  or  the  nature  of  things 
was  so  intent  upon  securing  a  certain  result  that 
it  defended  some  slender  incident  (Newman's 
ignorance  of  German,  in  which  so  many  of  his 
friends,  Pusey,  Hurrell  Froude,  Mozley,  were 
expert)  lest  the  great  event  and  consequence 
should  be  imperilled. 

Allow  me  then  to  recall  some  of  the  features 
of  the  time  which  gave  Tractarianism  its  signi- 
ficance, some  of  the  current  principles  held 
privately  and  avowed,  which,  as  I  hold,  becoming 


THE  CRY  FOR  CONTROL— TRACTARIANISM  75 

fixed  and  general,  encountered  in  Newman  and 
his  fellows  their  predestined  opposition  and,  in 
his  case,  their  overthrow.  There  will  be  no 
need  for  me  to  do  more  than  allude  to  names 
and  tendencies. 

*'  Perhaps  it  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  never, 
during  the  course  of  well-nigh  two  thousand  years 
in  the  world,  did  Christianity  so  widely  lose  the 
character  of  a  spiritual  religion  as  during  the  last 
half  of  the  eighteenth  century.  Not  in  England 
only  but  in  all  Protestant  countries  the  general 
aim  of  its  accredited  teachers  seems  to  have  been 
to  explain  away  its  mysteries  and  to  extenuate 
its  supernatural  character  ;  to  reduce  it  to  a  system 
of  Ethics  little  differing  from  the  doctrines  of 
Epictetus  or  Marcus  Aurelius."  **  Religious 
dogmas  were  almost  openly  admitted  to  be 
nonsense."  "  Religious  emotion  was  stigmatised 
as  enthusiasm."  A  bishop  of  that  period  pre- 
pared his  own  epitaph, — which  still  exists,— to  the 
effect  that  he  was,  and  he  thanked  God  for  it, 
the  foe  of  all  enthusiasm.  **  Theology  had  sunk 
into  an  apologetic  which  seemed  to  be  satisfied 
if  it  had  demonstrated  the  possibility  of  the  bare 
Existence  of  a  Deity.  Morality  rested  upon  the 
lowest  instincts  of  human   nature,  as,  e.g.,  that 


t6  ancestral  voices 

God  is  stronger  than  we  are  and  able  to  denounce 
us  if  we  do  not  do  good."  *'  The  categorical 
imperative  was,  '  Be  respectable,'  and  proofs  were 
continually  being  led  in  the  sermons  of  the  time 
that  religion  is  on  the  whole  conducive  to 
pleasure."  "The  age  seemed  smitten  with  an  in- 
capacity for  producing  deep  or  strong  feeling.  .  .  . 
There  were  few  poets,  and  none  of  a  high  order. 
Philosophy  had  fallen  into  the  hands  of  men  of  a 
dry  prosaic  nature,  who  had  not  enough  of  the 
materials  of  human  feeling  in  them  to  imagine 
any  of  its  more  complex  and  mysterious  mani- 
festations ;  all  of  which  they  either  left  out  of  their 
theories  or  introduced  them  with  such  explanations 
(Hume,  e.g.")  as  no  one  who  had  experienced  the 
feelings  could  receive  as  adequate." 

Such  a  state  of  matters  could  not  continue  in  a 
race  which,  to  say  no  more,  had  been  wont  to 
draw  from  deeper  wells.  There  was  sure  to  be 
a  cry  of  hunger  which  would  satisfy  itself  some- 
how. Into  this  emptiness  came  John  Wesley  and 
the  grace  of  God  by  his  word.  Though  the 
Tractarians  had  nothing  but  hard  words  and  an 
intellectual  contempt  for  evangelicalism  as  they 
knew  it,  they  have  one  and  all  of  them  paid 
tribute  to  the   work  of  Wesley,    acknowledging 


THE  CRY  FOR  CONTROL— TRACTARIANISM  T7 

freely  that  he  restored  the  idea  of  supernatural 
grace  to  the  religious  life  of  England.  Newman 
himself  passed  through  a  spiritual  crisis  in  no  way 
differing  from  a  typical  Methodist  conversion ; 
and  however  much  he  may  have  resented  the 
surroundings  and  manners  of  evangelicalism  he 
never  moved  away  from  the  discoveries  of  him- 
self and  of  God  which  had  been  borne  in  upon 
him  at  the  first.  Christianity  was  always  to  him 
a  tragic  experience,  in  which  a  man  is  saved  from 
some  elementary  terror,  not  by  any  process  of  en- 
lightenment or  alleviation,  but  by  the  reception  and 
acceptance  of  something  proposed  and  offered, 
something  which  his  own  reason,  his  taste,  his 
pride  may  resist,  but  something  which  his 
essential  nature  is  crying  out  for,  something  which 
has  its  only  but  sufficient  evidence  in  the  utter- 
ness  of  his  own  collapse,  and  the  certainty  of 
his  own  ruin  if  he  continues  to  reject  it.  The 
Tractarian  spirit  will  always  descend  upon  the 
Church  in  an  age  in  which  serious  men  feel  that 
it  is  no  time  for  half-measures. 

The  more  deeply  one  considers  any  phenomenon 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  the  more  thoroughly 
is  one  convinced  that  the  French  Revolution 
dominated  everything.     I  do  not  know  a  juster 


78  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

thing  to  say,  and  one  which,  if  you  accept  it, 
means  more  than  that  the  French  Revolution 
sent  a  shudder  through  three  men  of  supreme 
rank,  who  together  affected  fundamentally  the 
whole  expression  of  the  nineteenth  century — its 
politics,  its  idealism,  its  religion.  I  mean  Burke 
and  Wordsworth  and  Newman.  They  had  seen 
— Wordsworth  with  his  own  eyes — human  nature 
let  loose,  and  they  had  no  wish  to  see  it 
again. 

It  is,  I  venture  to  think,  by  keeping  our  eyes 
upon  the  swift  and  symbolical  degradation  of 
the  Revolution  in  France  that  we  can  best 
understand  the  wave  of  timidity  and  disillusion- 
ment which  passed  over  England  in  the  first  thirty 
years  of  that  century.  The  finer  spirits  had 
supposed  that  what  man  needed,  and  what  alone 
he  needed,  was  to  be  set  free  from  social  tyrannies ; 
that  thereafter  the  essential  nature  of  man,  which 
was  supposed  to  be,  and  had  been  declared  by 
Rousseau  to  be,  "  wonderfully  good  and  innocent," 
would  rise  naturally  into  a  beautiful  behaviour 
which  man  would  go  on  maintaining  and 
making  more  beautiful.  Men  who  are  now 
midway  through  life  are  old  enough  to  recall  the 
rhetoric  of  their  own  earlier  days,  when  it  was 


THE  CRY  FOR  CONTROL— TRACTARIANISM  79 

believed  that  if  only  the  people  had  two  things, — 
secular  education  and  the  franchise, — wars  and 
animosities  and  licentiousness  even  would  pass 
away  as  tortures  and  superstitions  had  passed 
away.  The  disillusionment  and  sorrow  of  our 
time  has  at  the  heart  of  it  this  very  disappointment. 
And  the  next  great  movement,  I  hold,  in  the 
Church  will  be  based  upon  the  same  timidity, 
approaching  to  terror  at  times,  that  lies  at  the  back 
of  all  Wordsworth's  greatest  poetry,  and  became 
the  very  basis  and  reason  of  Tractarianism. 

What  happened  in  France — and  though  history 
never  repeats  itself,  yet  the  human  soul  is  the 
same  yesterday,  to-day,  and  for  ever,  in  its 
ultimate  attitudes  and  reactions  and  precautions, 
and  these  form  the  material  of  religion — what 
happened  in  France  was  that  human  nature,  let 
loose  from  the  old  feudal  restraints,  plunged  into 
a  liberty  without  obligation,  without  any  holy 
background  or  overmastering  idea  in  which  to 
rebuke  itself  and  to  recover  itself ;  and  had  ended 
in  an  unbridled  orgy  under  the  aegis  of  a  goddess 
of  reason  who  was  simply  incarnate  licentious- 
ness. Wordsworth  had  witnessed  all  that — and 
though  Browning  went  too  far  in  calling  him 
*•  The  Lost  Leader,"  still  it  is  true  that  though  he 


80  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

is  ever  on  the  side  of  man,  his  mind  is  haunted 
by  the  memory  of  that  great  collapse.  There  is 
never  absent  from  his  writing  a  spirit  of  caution, 
an  appeal  to  make  the  best  of  what  remains  to 
us  all  and  can  never  be  taken  from  us.  He  asks 
us  to  be  on  our  guard  against  all  violent  and 
catastrophic  courses.  He  would  assure  us  that 
true  freedom  lies  not  in  circumstances  but  in  the 
soul ;  that  the  really  good  things  of  life  are  open 
and  free  to  us  all — the  natural  world,  the  hills, 
"the  round  ocean  and  the  living  air,  and  the 
blue  sky  and  in  the  mind  of  man,"  so  that  his 
friend  Charles  Lamb  twitted  him,  that  in  his 
view  a  man  could  not  be  a  man  unless  he  had  a 
mountain  outside  his  window.  It  is  this  message 
of  caution,  of  patience — this  appeal  to  men  to  find 
liberty  and  the  joy  of  life  in  themselves,  in  dis- 
regard and  contempt  of  circumstance,  which  lies,  I 
repeat,  at  the  heart  of  his  most  significant  work. 

"The  primal  duties  shine  aloft  like  stars, 
The  Charities  that  soothe  and  heal  and  bless, 
Are  scattered  at  the  feet  of  man  like  flowers." 

"A  true  man 
Finds  comfort  in  himself  and  in  his  cause, 
And  while  the  mortal  mist  is  gathering,  draws 
His  breath  in  confidence  of  heaven's  applause." 

"  Long  have  I  loved  what  I  behold  : 
The  night  that  calms,  the  day  that  cheers ; 


THE  CRY  FOR  CONTROL— TRACTARIANISM  8i 

The  Common  growth  of  mother-earth, 
The  humblest  mirth  and  tears. 
These  given,  what  more  need  I  desire, 
To  stir,  to  soothe,  to  elevate? 
What  nobler  marvels  than  the  mind 
May  in  life's  daily  prospect  find, 
May  find  or  may  create  ? " 

Or  again  : 

"There's  not  a  man 
That  lives,  who  hath  not  known  his  godlike  hours, 
And  feels  not  what  an  empire  we  inherit 
As  natural  beings,  in  the  strength  of  nature." 

In  these,  and  I  claim  that  these  are  character- 
istic of  Wordsworth's  mature  inspiration,  for  his 
inspiration  was  not  Hke  Shelley's,  purely  intuitional, 
but  was  the  result  of  a  pressure  of  reason  upon 
things, — in  these  you  have  Wordsworth's  reaction 
(to  use  our  modern  phrase)  against  a  wind  which 
was  blowing  strongly  in  his  day,  a  wind  which 
seemed  to  him  to  threaten  to  fling  down  some 
long-flying  flag  of  the  soul. 

And  if  you  say,  "  But  Wordsworth  was  a  poet, 

an  artist,"  and  proceed  to  afllict  me  with  some 

talk  about  art  for  art's  sake,   I  reply  that,   like 

Dante,    Wordsworth    was    above    everything    a 

thinking    man    and    a   moralist   whose   work   is 

penetrated  by  a  moral  concern.     And  besides,  we 

have  his  own  explicit  avowal  in  a  letter  to  Sir 
6 


82  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

George  Beaumont  that  in  all  his  poetry  he  is  to 
be  considered  a  teacher  or  nothing. 

Now  all  this  is  not  beside  the  point  when  I  go 
on  to  say  that  in  essence  the  caution  and  con- 
servatism which  underlies  Wordsworth  is  the 
same  spirit  precisely,  and  rooted  in  the  same 
circumstances,  as  gave  rise  and  cogency  and  joy 
and  prosperity  to  the  Tractarian  movement.  Both 
offer  the  aristocratic  or  individualistic  solution 
of  life's  problems.  Both  have  a  genuine  fear  of 
human  nature  except  within  the  sanctions  of  a 
long-established  society.  In  both  there  is  a 
shrinking  from  the  face  of  things,  a  falling  back 
upon  an  esoteric  insight  and  experience. 

Now  if  Wordsworth  behaved  in  this  way 
simply  because  he  was  an  Englishman,  if  the 
wave  of  liberty  and  secular  knowledge  and 
analysis  as  these  assaulted  all  the  institutions  of 
the  Spirit,  had  this  effect  of  fear  upon  him,  it  is 
not  to  be  wondered  at  that  in  England  at  that  time 
there  should  be  a  group  of  sensitive  men  in  the 
Church  with  the  fineness  to  detect  the  same 
grounds  for  fear,  with  the  speculative  boldness 
to  push  their  inquiries  back  and  back  into  still 
remoter  causes ;  and  with  the  training  and  tem- 
perament as  officers  in  the  Church  to   conclude 


THE  CRY  FOR  CONTROL— TRACTARIANISM  83 

that  the  Church  was  the  instrument  by  which  the 
higher  interests  of  life  could  be  secured,  and  the 
home  in  which  a  totally  different  moral  taste  and 
ambition  could  be  created  and  fostered. 

Stripped  of  all  that  was  merely  local  or 
temporary,  the  problem  as  the  Tractarians 
perceived  it,  was  precisely  the  problem  which 
confronted  Faust  in  the  very  moment  of  his 
dying.  He  saw,  you  remember,  a  great  wave  of 
knowledge,  of  knowledge  let  loose  from  the  hard- 
won  maxims  of  the  human  race,  and  in  antagonism 
to  them,  he  saw  that  wave  creeping  up  over  the 
sand  on  a  long  promontory.  He  saw  it  rising  up 
and  up  towards  two  buildings  erected  there  on 
the  shore  of  the  inexorable  ocean  of  time.  The 
two  buildings  were  the  twin  edifices  of  the 
Christian  spirit  in  the  world, — namely,  a  Christian 
Church  and  a  Christian  home.  Heedless  of  the 
value  of  these,  he  had  consented  to  their  destruc- 
tion. But,  as  the  smoke  of  their  burning  blew 
towards  him,  he  realised  how  he  had  injured  the 
human  race,  and  in  a  cry  of  agony  that  he  might 
be  spared,  if  not  to  replace  those  ancient  haunts  of 
the  spirit,  at  least  to  offer  mankind  some  other 
reason  and  retreat  for  life,  Faust  fell  down  dead. 

And  now  let  me  pass  by  all  manner  of  things, 


84  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

and  proceed  to  fling  down  some  of  the  pro- 
positions which  I  should  have  Hked  to  co-ordinate 
into  some  kind  of  system. 

The  Tractarians  set  themselves,  as  they 
believed,  to  save  Society  as  they  and  we  know 
Society.  And  they  believed  it  could  be  saved 
only  by  a  new  manifestation  of  the  supernatural 
powers  inherent  in  the  Church  of  Christ.  Now 
with  that  position  we  should  probably  none  of  us 
quarrel  if  we  were  permitted  to  define  the  terms 
in  our  own  way.  But  with  that  position  I  find 
myself  in  an  increasing  and  deepening  sympathy 
— even  when  the  terms  are  defined  as  they  were 
defined  by  the  Tractarians.  Society,  as  we  know 
it,  is  a  Christian  product.  Marriage,  as  we  know 
it,  is  part  of  the  Christian  discipline  or  "kultur." 
I  do  not  wonder  that  certain  things  which  I  hold 
to  be  cardinal  in  social  life  should  be  assailed 
in  our  day,  any  more  than  I  should  wonder  at  a 
building  collapsing  when  I  know  that  for  a  long 
time  people  have  been  undermining  its  foundations. 
The  Tractarians  chose  as  their  way  of  influencing 
the  world  that  the  Church  should  stand  aloof 
from  men.  The  first  thing  was  for  the  Church  to 
save  herself,  to  establish  anew  her  bodily  existence 
in  the  midst  of  all  human  contentions.     And  so 


THE  CRY  FOR  CONTROL— TRACTARIANISM  85 

the  Tractarians — witness  Newman's  sermons — 
continually  declare  that  there  is  no  hope,  until 
Christian  men  separate  themselves  from  the 
general  life  that  is  about  them,  and  live  as  men 
have  not  lived  for  generations,  a  more  secluded 
and  supernatural  life.  The  world  as  such  was 
almost  wholly  evil.  The  contentions  of  men 
were  all  rooted  in  self-seeking,  however  their 
spirit  might  be  cloaked  in  high-sounding  words. 
The  human  reason  had  got  out  of  hand,  and 
was  now  intruding  into  matters  for  which  she  was 
in  the  nature  of  things  not  competent.  Criticism, 
analysis,  had  reached  a  point  where  thinking  had 
become  a  vice, — simply  another  form  of  self- 
indulgence,  and  so  on. 

The  Tractarians  were  right  in  believing  that 
the  Church  is  strongest  when  she  is  in  protest 
against  the  spirit  of  the  time.  It  is  minorities 
which  control  the  world.  And  in  taking  the  high 
ground  which  she  did  take,  it  was  only  a  late 
instance  of  a  recurring  and  invincible  instinct  of 
the  Christian  spirit.  Already  we  can  detect  this 
exclusiveness  in  the  New  Testament. 

'*  Beloved,  we  are  of  God,  and  the  whole  world 
lieth  in  the  Evil  One."  It  is  the  very  breath 
of  the  Old  Testament,  subsequent  to  the  Exile. 


86  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

"Chronicles"  may  not  be  good  history  but  it  is 
excellent  devotion,  and  represents  the  attitude 
which  the  Church  will  always  take  in  a  day  of 
general  apostasy.  The  finer  souls  will  draw 
together,  to  cherish  in  each  other's  breast  the 
sacred  fire.  The  Church  will  always  pass  into  a 
period  when  she  will  cease  disputing  with  the 
world — as  I  think  she  should  now  cease — and 
should  proceed  to  cultivate  her  own  life.  There 
are  things  which  are  not  true  for  the  world,  which 
are  binding  on  members  of  Christ's  body.  I  ndeed, 
I  doubt  very  much  whether  it  is  possible  to 
practise  Christianity  in  the  world,  whether  it 
must  not  be  practised  within  the  believing  com- 
munity and  towards  the  world. 

No  good  comes  of  bullying  men  of  the  world 
with  the  enunciation  of  our  higher  principles. 
These  the  world  fundamentally  rejects  because 
meanwhile  it  has  no  taste  for  them.  We  must 
convict  the  world  of  sin,  and  of  righteousness,  and 
of  judgment  to  come. 

And  there  are  times — I  hold  the  present  to  be 
such  a  time — when  we  can  do  this  only  by  the 
manifestation  of  a  holier  and  more  satisfied  life 
within  the  community.  We  must  not  hesitate  to 
tell  men  that  Christianity  is  torture  to  the  natural 


THE  CRY  FOR  CONTROL— TRACTARIANISM  87 

man ;  and  that  that  is  so  because,  in  the 
bracing  language  of  our  fathers,  the  natural 
man  is  damned. 

"The  question  to-day  is  not,  is  Christianity 
true,  but  is  Christianity  possible  ?  " 

You  cannot  prove  to  the  world  that  Christianity 
will  work  :  it  will  not  work  for  worldly  men.  On 
the  purely  intellectual  level  Nietzscheanism  is 
as  self-consistent  a  system  as  Christianity.  And 
if  the  one  or  two  absolutely  essential  things  in 
Christian  dogmatics  are  withdrawn — such  as  the 
existence  of  the  soul  and  a  judgment  at  the  end 
of  the  world,  in  which  men  will  be  tried  by  their 
loyalty  to  Christ — truths  not  of  the  reason — if 
these  be  withdrawn,  then  Antichrist  can  give 
reasons  for  his  rule. 

The  instinct  to  give  up  the  world  slumbers  at 
all  times  within  the  Church,  and  from  time  to  time 
becomes  public  and  inevitable.  Unless  we  are 
going  to  secularise  all  history,  this  instinct  betrays 
some  necessity  in  the  religious  soul.  The  required 
atmosphere  is  secured  by  shutting  out  certain 
things,  by  selection  and  refusal.  But  all  thinking 
all  sane  living,  proceeds  by  the  same  process — by 
walling  off  things  which  are  meanwhile  irrelevant 
to  the  purpose  in  hand.     It  is  one  description  of 


88  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

an  insane  man  that  everything  occurs  to  him  at 
the  same  moment  and  as  being  of  equal  import- 
ance. And  to  quote  Bergson  again,  the  very 
function  of  the  brain  is  to  enable  us,  not  to 
remember  but  to  forget,  to  exclude,  to  select. 

There  is  something  which  claims  my  allegiance 
in  a  saying  of  Newman's  to  the  effect  that  the 
vicissitudes  in  the  soul  of  a  poor  Irishwoman  are 
of  more  consequence  to  God  than  the  fall  and 
the  disintegration  of  empires.  At  any  rate,  I 
challenge  any  Christian  man  to  continue  to  hold 
the  converse — or  to  preach  the  converse. 

"The  spectacle  of  triumphant  evil  and  of  the 
world's  corruption  has  always  acted  upon  some 
remarkable  minds  like  the  perpetual  presence  of 
some  hateful  apparition,  penetrating  them  with 
disgust,  depressing  them  with  gloom,  or  goading 
them  to  retaliation.  They  are  ever  in  imaginary 
contest  with  that  foe — that  hostile  impersonation, 
challenged  by  his  success  and  disquieted  by  his 
satisfaction.  Such  minds  have  embraced  the  ap- 
palling vision  of  the  world's  evil  with  the  keenness 
and  illumination  of  inspired  prophets"  (Mozley) 
— and  again  and  again  they  see  no  immediate  re- 
source but  to  gather  together  like-minded  people, 
in  order  that  in  each  other's  society,  and  as  is 


THE  CRY  FOR  CONTROL— TRACT  ARIA  NISM  89 

believed,  within  a  more  immediate  and  sustained 
communion  with  the  Unseen,  they  may  continue 
to  believe  in  their  own  best  inspirations. 

The  criticism  of  Tractarianism  which  comes 
ready  to  hand,  is  that  it  was  a  Clerical  move- 
ment :  and  this  is  supposed  of  necessity  to  dis- 
parage it. 

To  that  criticism  I  have  two  things  to  say : 
first,  it  was  not  a  purely  clerical  movement ; 
and,  second,  supposing  it  was,  it  will  not  do  to 
give  it  that  name  and  then  stop  thinking  about  it. 
To  say  that  it  was  a  clerical  movement  need  only 
mean,  and  in  the  circumstances  only  meant,  that 
it  was  a  movement  amongst  those  who,  by  their 
very  calling,  were  most  concerned  about  the 
welfare  of  the  Church,  and  most  distressed  by  the 
apparent  contradictions  of  her  whole  idea  both 
within  the  Church  and  in  the  world.  It  is  not 
strange  that  the  Church  recognised  the  situation, 
in  her  heart  and  brain.  In  my  own  view  it 
would  not  disparage  or  reduce  the  authority  of  a 
movement  in  this  country  that  it  should  begin 
with  a  small  group  of  highly  educated  and  sensi- 
tive men  who  are  set  apart  for  this  very  thing,  to 
feel  in  a  kind  of  substitutionary  way  the  malady 
or  threatening  of  our  time,  to  feel  as  a  personal 


90  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

grief  the  general  apostasy,  and  to  examine  them- 
selves in  order  to  see  some  way  of  escape. 
Unless  there  was  never  intended  to  be  anything 
in  the  metaphor  of  the  shepherd  and  the  sheep, 
it  must  always  be  in  the  minds  of  selected  men 
that  things  first  become  acute  and  intolerable. 
"  I  protest,"  said  an  apostle,  "  that  we  die  daily — 
nevertheless  you  live." 

I  should  not  disparage  a  movement  which 
should  begin  with  the  frank  facing  of  two  in- 
controvertible positions  as  I  take  them  to  be : 
first,  that  a  religion  must  never  be  allowed  to 
become  less  than  it  was — less  either  in  the 
matter  of  its  moral  severity,  or  less  in  the  matter 
of  its  ministrations  of  peace ;  and  second,  that 
whilst  Popery  and  Calvinism  were,  and  are,  real 
religions,  having  created  and  moulded  nations 
and  laws  and  societies,  a  vague  and  consenting 
Christianity  has  done  nothing  and  is  never  likely 
to  do  anything. 

Then  there  is  a  second  criticism  which  I  shall 
allude  to,  and  close.  I  mean  the  criticism,  also 
made  in  disparagement,  that  the  movement  was 
academic,  secluded,  aristocratic — in  short,  that  it 
was  an  Oxford  movement.  But  in  the  first  place 
it  did  not   remain   at   Oxford.     And  again,  the 


THE  CRY  FOR  CONTROL— TRACT ARIANISM  91 

beginnings  of  all  great  movements  have  been  in 
some  place  which,  if  it  was  not  in  Oxford,  was 
nevertheless  a  place  of  retreat,  where  men  could 
think  out  things  and  see  the  bearing  of  one  thing 
upon  another.  And  besides,  since  a  great  part  of 
the  challenge  to  the  Church  and  Christian  creed 
was  made  in  the  name  of  reason  and  enlighten- 
ment and  new  learning,  it  was  a  fitting  and 
admirable  thing  that  the  defence  should  come  by 
the  lips  of  men  who  could  not  be  accused  of 
ignorance.  In  these  later  days  we  have  all 
been  greatly  relieved  by  the  services  rendered 
to  faith  by  university  men — by  men  like  James 
Ward  of  Cambridge  and  William  James  of 
Harvard. 

It  is  a  question  to  ask  ourselves  whether  it  is 
not  the  absence  of  some  such  place  of  intense  and 
thorough  thinking  which  is  responsible  for  the 
want  of  decision  in  our  own  immediate  outlook 
and  for  the  want  of  concentration  upon  some 
immediate  task  of  the  Spirit. 

And  there,  by  the  way,  I  have  touched  upon 
another  matter  which  I  should  have  liked  to 
dwell  upon.  The  Church  needs  for  its  life  and 
for  its  influence  upon  every  passing  generation 
some   aim    short    of    the    ultimate    aim    of    the 


92  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

Kingdom  of  God.  The  religious  life  of  Scotland 
has  always  had,  I  think,  a  very  near  horizon. 
We  have  had  always  some  definite  plea,  some 
protest  or  claim ;  and  we  have  included  or 
excluded  men  by  their  attitude  towards  that 
particular  thing.  It  made  for  the  strength  of 
Tractarianism,  and  it  makes  for  the  strength  of 
the  High  Church  party,  that  it  knows  what  it 
wants ;  and  what  it  wants,  it  wants  from  you 
before  it  has  any  further  dealings  with  you. 

It  was  inevitable  that  the  Tractarians  should 
try  to  put  a  curb  upon  the  spirit  of  criticism,  upon 
what  they  would  not  have  hesitated  to  call  the 
licentiousness  of  the  mere  intellect.  Newman 
may  not  have  known  German,  but  he  had  learned 
from  Kant,  by  way  of  Coleridge,  of  the  difference 
between  the  "  Verstand  "  and  the  "Vernunft" — 
and  in  consequence  you  will  find  in  his  apologetic 
wonderful  anticipations  of  recent  and  present-day 
results  in  psychology.  There  is  an  amazing 
similarity  in  the  underlying  ideas  of  such  very 
dissimilar  books  as  The  Grammar  of  Assent, 
the  Pragmatism  of  William  James,  and  the 
Personal  Idealism  of  men  like  Schiller  and  Bussell 
and  Inge. 

The  only  difference  is  that  Newman  and  the 


THE  CRY  FOR  CONTROL— TRACT ARIANISM  93 

Tractarisins  proceed  upon  the  truth — that  finally  the 
thing  which  disposes  a  man  to  accept  a  belief  is  a 
last  prejudice  or  bias  in  his  own  mind  towards  it. 
The  Tractarians  would  not  agree  that  truth  is 
simply  what  one  troweth.  Such  an  idea  was  their 
b^te  noire.  But  they  did  agree  that  training  and 
early  suggestion  had  much  to  do  with  the  require- 
ments which  anyone  will  afterwards  make  of  any 
theory  of  human  life  and  destiny  which  is  pro- 
posed for  his  acceptance.  They  were  altogether 
opposed  to  the  idea,  which  indeed  has  nothing  to 
say  for  itself,  that  Truth  must  not  receive  any 
assistance  from  within  our  own  minds.  We  hear 
men  speak  as  though  nothing  must  ever  be  gained 
for  Truth  from  within  and  by  the  mind's  own 
courage,  enabling  us  to  face  difficulties.  In 
order  to  be  intelligent,  it  is  announced  that  Faith 
must  always  be  making  concessions,  and  that  it  is 
only  when  she  acknowledges  herself  beaten  that 
she  is  sound  and  healthy.  They  held  that  a  great 
belief  is  not  to  be  gained  by  making  a  doctrine 
less  supernatural,  but  by  making  the  mind  more 
aspiring ;  not  by  lowering  the  truth  but  by 
raising  the  mind.  The  mind,  they  held,  is  to  be 
trained  to  faith  of  set  purpose  and  by  distinct 
inculcation  of  all  the   imagery   of  faith  upon  its 


94  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

attention  (Mozley).  And  so,  whilst  it  would  be 
unfair  to  accuse  the  Tractarians  either  at  the 
beginning  or  in  their  present  representatives  of 
encouraging  superstition  and  over-beliefs,  they 
certainly — and  I  for  one  do  not  blame  them — 
were  not  too  eager  to  examine  critically  men's 
habitual  ways  of  thinking.  They  were  always 
afraid  lest,  in  emptying  out  the  bath,  you  might 
empty  out  the  baby.  They  shared  Blougram's 
fear,  that  if  you  begin  to  make  cuts  at  the  out- 
growths of  faith,  at  the  enthusiastic  expressions 
of  belief  which  have  come  down  to  us  from 
warmer  and  surer  times  and  from  more  intimate 
communications  with  God,  you  may  wound  some- 
thing vital :  in  any  case  you  whet  your  own 
appetite  for  criticism.  Like  Blougram,  they  were 
afraid — and  I  think  I  rather  share  their  misgiving, 
though  I  should  have  to  alter  the  phraseology — 
that  "once  cut  at  the  Naples'  liquefaction,  and 
you  may  end  with  Fichte's  clever  cut  at  God 
Himself." 


V 


TERTIUM  QUID:  THE  MESSAGE  OF 
G.  K.  CHESTERTON 

THERE  is  one  qualification  which  I  can 
claim  for  presuming  to  write  upon  the 
work  of  Mr.  Gilbert  K.  Chesterton  with  the  view 
of  indicating  his  spirit  and  intention — this,  namely, 
that  I  start  with  a  rather  enthusiastic  prejudice 
in  his  favour.  For  it  is  one  of  many  proofs  that 
Mr.  Chesterton  has  something  vital  to  say  to  us, 
and  challenges  the  very  temper  of  the  time,  that 
of  those  who  know  his  work  with  any  real  under- 
standing, there  are  only  two  classes — those  who 
receive  him  with  enthusiasm,  and  those  who 
become  quite  angry  when  you  mention  his  name. 
There  are,  of  course,  others  who  adopt  another 
attitude.  They  say  he  is  simply  a  very  bold  and 
careless  writer  who  has  a  trick  of  exaggeration 
and  paradox.  I  do  not  propose  to  deal  with 
these  last :  no  good  could  come  of  it ;  we  have 
nothing  in  common. 

95 


96  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

In  dealing  with  a  man's  work  it  is  an  advantage 
to  have  a  prejudice  in  his  favour.  It  seems  to 
me  indeed  that  it  is  only  about  those  for  whom 
we  have  a  private  regard  that  we  should  take 
upon  ourselves  to  speak.  Our  prejudice  gives  us 
our  point  of  view,  and  in  every  region  our  view  is 
largely  determined  by  our  point  of  view.  We 
know  how  very  dangerous  an  exercise  it  is  for  us 
to  be  speaking  about  one  who  is  absent,  unless 
we  are  quite  sure  that  we  like  him.  We  know 
how,  otherwise,  we  are  apt  to  fall  into  a  merely 
external  and  critical  tone  of  voice,  to  make  an 
unfair  selection  of  his  words  or  his  actions,  and 
so  arrive  at  a  conclusion  which  really  all  the  time 
was  predetermined  by  the  bias  of  our  mind. 
The  fact  is,  that  in  dealing  with  a  man  like 
Chesterton,  who  is  never  for  one  moment  engaged 
with  anything  less  than  the  ultimate  meaning  of 
life,  we  cannot  avoid  playing  with  loaded  dice. 
On  ultimate  matters  we  have  none  of  us  mere 
opinions,  in  the  strict  sense  of  the  word.  We 
have  really  only  prejudices.  What  we  fondly 
imagine  to  be  our  opinions  are  without  doubt  the 
effect  or  resultant  within  us  of  an  unfathomable 
wealth  of  instincts,  reasons,  desires,  corroborated 
or   modified   or    contradicted   by   education,    by 


TERTIUM  QUID  97 

environment,  by  the  stimulus  of  example,  by  the 
rebuke  of  pain — all  these  fixed,  summarised,  and 
sealed  in  moulds  of  thought  or  faith  from  time  to 
time  by  some  pre-eminent  event  of  our  personal 
life.  The  white  sheet  of  paper  with  which  we 
begin  our  life  is  an  impossible  fancy.  We  begin 
with,  so  to  speak,  a  sheet  of  sensitised  paper  on 
which  innumerable  characters  are  already  inscribed 
in  invisible  ink.  We  begin  with  a  possible  career 
ready  to  declare  itself,  ready  to  take  advantage 
of  occasions,  ready  to  find  correspondences  in  the 
world.  What  we  see  in  life  depends,  when  all  is 
said,  upon  certain  secrets  of  ultimate  personality  ; 
and  what  we  shall  see  in  any  man  like  Chesterton, 
whose  whole  intellectual  interest  is  in  life  con- 
sidered in  its  ultimate  significance,  will  likewise 
depend  upon  the  secret  things  of  our  spirit. 

It  is  easy  to  name  the  features  in  Chesterton's 
work  which  have  made  the  bricks  fly  at  his  head. 
Those  features  which  have  provoked  this  violence 
in  certain  souls  have  had  a  milder  effect  in  the 
case  of  certain  others  :  they  scarcely  know  whether 
to  accept  him  or  not.  For  one  thing,  his  con- 
fidence in  the  value  of  human  existence,  or  (to 
use  the  words  we  know  best)  his  belief  in  God, 
is  a  very  strange  thing  in  those  high  places  of 
7 


98  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

literature  and  art  and  philosophy  which  together 
form  Chesterton's  chosen  ground.  And  in  his 
case  belief  in  God  is  no  difficult  attainment,  no 
conclusion  to  which  he  merely  inclines  simply  to 
save  him  from  despair  or  madness.  (He  sees 
very  clearly  that  faith  alone  really  does  save  men 
from  despair  and  madness,  but  it  was  not  because 
of  that  that  he  first  believed.)  He  believes  in 
God  with  heartiness  and  uproariousness.  If  you 
were  to  ask  him,  as  many  of  his  critics  in  various 
ways  have  asked  him,  for  what  reason  he  believes, 
he  would  probably  retort  by  telling  you  that  it  is 
for  the  same  reason  as  he  eats,  or  laughs,  or  takes 
a  walk  in  the  moonlight,  i.e.  because  he  wants  to. 
He  would  be  quite  willing  to  confess  to  you  that 
ultimately  the  reason  for  the  faith  in  his  heart  was 
precisely  the  same  as  the  reason  for,  say,  the  nose 
on  his  face — namely,  that  there  it  is,  that  he  was 
so  made.  Deeply  considered,  that  is  neither 
frivolous  nor  unphilosophical.  We  might  make 
a  list  of  the  most  serious  thinkers  of  the  world, 
beginning  with  St.  Augustine  (to  go  no  farther 
back),  including  such  names  as  Pascal  and  our 
own  Butler,  and  closing  with  the  contemporary 
school  of  philosophy  in  Oxford,  and  with  William 
James  of  Harvard,  the  fundamental  argument  for 


TERTIUM  QUID  99 

faith  in  each  case  being  simply  that  which 
Chesterton  states  and  reiterates  with  violence  and 
enthusiasm  :  that  so  we  are  made,  that  to  be  a 
man  is  to  have — so  to  put  it — some  share  in  God. 
This  defence  of  faith  which  Chesterton  has 
celebrated — namely,  that  the  faculty  and  exercise  of 
faith  belong  to  the  proper  life  and  essence  of  man, 
that  belief  is  a  normal  function  of  the  human  soul — 
is  his  message  to  our  time  :  it  is  the  background 
and  motive  of  all  his  work.  He  is  the  protagonist 
of  normal  men,  seeking  to  declare  and  to  defend 
their  rights,  and,  above  everything,  their  right  to 
believe  in  God.  I  do  not  wonder,  therefore,  that 
those  people  should  not  like  Chesterton,  and 
should  privately  be  rather  astonished  that  a  man 
of  his  wide-awakeness  and  erudition  should  be 
saying  the  confident  things  that  he  does  say,  and 
that  his  whole  work  should  be  penetrated  by 
Christianity — those  people  who  imagined  that 
the  whole  Christian  view  of  God  and  the  world 
had  received  its  quietus  from  Tyndal  and  Huxley 
and  Renan  and  Strauss,  who  have  not  been  giving 
their  minds  to  the  later  stages  of  the  controversy, 
and  who  are  therefore  not  aware  of  the  embarrass- 
ments which  pure  materialism  has  discovered  from 
its  own  postulates.    But  it  is  not  only  the  substance 


lOO  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

of  Chesterton  which  offends  many  ;  it  is  not  only 
that  certain  people  are  enraged  that  the  spiritual 
basis  of  life  should  have  found  such  a  cheerful 
and  boisterous  defender,  who  will  not  take  the 
materialists  so  seriously  as  they  take  themselves  : 
there  are  many  others  who  are  probably  in  perfect 
agreement  with  Chesterton's  principles  and  point 
of  view  who  are  nevertheless  offended  and  irritated 
by  the  manner  in  which  he  will  say  what  he  has 
to  say.  There  is  no  doubt  whatever  that  Chester- 
ton's humour  and  playfulness — his  ridiculousness, 
indeed — has  had  the  effect  of  diminishing  his 
authority  for  a  great  many  people.  It  is  a  very 
curious  thing  that  we  all  of  us  are  much  more 
easily  convinced  by  a  solemn  manner  than  by  a 
happy  manner.  For  my  own  part,  I  agree  with 
Chesterton  that  when  we  deal  in  a  merely  solemn 
way  with  the  ultimate  meaning  of  our  life  it  is  a 
proof  that  at  that  moment  we  ourselves  are  not 
very  sure  of  it.  It  was  this  paradox  which  the 
plain  man — a  verger  he  is  reported  to  have  been 
— had  at  the  back  of  his  mind  when  he  professed 
that  although  he  had  heard  some  twenty  courses 
of  Bampton  Lectures  on  the  Defence  of  Faith,  he 
still  remained  a  humble  believer. 

Let  me  bring  before  your  minds  an  historical 


TERTIUM  QUID  loi 

contrast.  There  is  a  very  obvious  similarity 
between  the  humour  of  Thomas  Carlyle  and  that 
of  Chesterton.  There  is,  indeed,  a  very  interest- 
ing identity  between  the  messages  of  the  one  and 
the  other,  Carlyle  girding  at  the  Utilitarians  of 
his  day  as  Chesterton  pokes  fun  at  the  **  Scientists  " 
of  our  own.  But  Carlyle  has  not  to  encounter 
the  suspicion  of  people  as  Chesterton  must,  and 
this  I  believe  really  for  one  great  reason.  Carlyle 
is  solemn,  he  is  heavy,  he  is  awful.  It  may  not 
be  true  in  fact  that  he  counselled  a  humble 
tobacconist,  who  confessed  that  she  had  not  the 
particular  brand  that  he  asked  for  but  had  another 
quite  as  good,  that  "  she  should  always  deal  in  the 
eternal  verities  " — that  may  not  be  a  true  story,  but 
it  ought  to  be.  Now  Chesterton  will  not  be  solemn, 
and  never  is  he  so  full  of  laughter  and  joy  as  when 
he  is  dealing  with  the  most  momentous  things. 
Carlyle  is  always  making  his  way  towards  some 
tremendous  aphorism  which  shall  embody  the 
argument  of  a  whole  paragraph  or  chapter ; 
whereas  Chesterton  is  always  making  for  some 
apparently  frivolous  instance  or  paradox. 

Now  I  venture  to  say  that  just  as  the  teaching 
of  Carlyle — and  this  is  true  of  all  merely  solemn 
minds — is  much   shallower  than  it  looks,  so  that 


I02  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

the  farther  you  go  into  it  the  less  original  or 
profound  it  is,  so  the  teaching  of  Mr.  Chesterton, 
gay  and  careless  and  ridiculous  as  it  so  fre- 
quently seems  to  be,  is  at  the  last  always  serious, 
and  to  anyone  who  knows  the  age  in  which  we 
live,  who  knows  what  is  being  said  and  the 
conclusions  which  are  being  formed,  his  words 
will  always  have  the  effect  of  sending  the  spirit 
sounding  on  and  on. 

For  the  fact  is  you  cannot  do  justice  to  Mr. 
Chesterton's  humour  and  whimsicality,  as  an 
instrument  for  arriving  at  truth,  until  you  take 
hold  of  this — that,  in  his  view,  the  sense  of 
humour,  the  happy  way  of  looking  at  things,  the 
faculty  for  joy,  is  an  integral  part  of  the  human 
soul,  having  rights  as  inalienable  as  any  other. 
In  his  fine  paper  in  the  volume  on  Heretics ,  in 
answer  to  Mr.  M'Cabe's  criticism  that  he  ought 
to  consider  the  intellectual  problems  of  life  more 
gravely,  Chesterton  deals  at  length  with  the 
charge,  and  almost  on  every  page  of  his  work 
he  presents  the  same  thesis.  For  example  :  "A 
man  must  be  very  full  of  faith  to  jest  with  his 
divinity.  .  .  .  To  the  Hebrew  prophets,  their 
religion  was  so  solid  a  thing,  like  a  mountain  or 
a  mammoth,   that  the  irony  of  its  contact  with 


TERTIUM  QUID  103 

trivial  and  fleeting  things  struck  them  like  a 
blow."  "  Merriment  is  one  of  the  world's  natural 
flowers  and  not  one  of  its  exotics.  Gigantesque 
levity,  flamboyant  eloquence,  are  the  mere  out- 
bursts of  a  human  sympathy  and  bravado  as  old 
and  solid  as  the  stars."  "We  should  all  like 
to  speak  poetry  at  the  moments  when  we  truly 
live ;  and  if  we  do  not  speak  it,  it  is  because  we 
have  an  impediment  in  our  speech." 

In  his  volume  on  Dickens  he  says  a  thing 
which  must  have  been  suggested  not  only  by  the 
reading  of  Dickens,  but  by  observing  the  pro- 
cesses of  his  own  mind.  "  Dickens,"  he  says, 
"  had  to  be  ridiculous  in  order  to  begin  to  be  true. 
His  characters  that  begin  solemn  end  futile ;  his 
characters  that  begin  frivolous  end  solemn  in  the 
best  sense.  His  foolish  figures  are  not  only 
more  entertaining  than  his  serious  figures,  they 
are  also  much  more  serious."  We  shall  give  an 
example  of  this  in  a  moment. 

Let  us  dwell  for  a  little  longer  on  this  matter — 
I  mean  the  medium  of  good-humour  and  gaiety 
and  colloquialness  which  Chesterton  uses,  and 
cannot  help  using,  in  the  interests  of  truth ;  and 
let  us  keep  before  ourselves  the  literary  medium 
which  by  contrast  Carlyle  adopted.     I  should  say 


I04  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

that  the  difference  is  just  this ;  Carlyle,  though 
by  birth  one  of  the  common  people,  nevertheless 
speaks  of  the  people  or  at  the  people  from  above. 
Chesterton,  though  by  birth,  as  I  should  imagine, 
of  a  much  higher  rank,  in  all  his  writing  and 
thinking  speaks  of  the  people  from  their  own 
point  of  view,  from  the  point  of  view  which  they 
would  take  up  if  they  should  ever  become  self- 
conscious  and  enlightened  enough  to  express  them- 
selves. It  is  a  definite  charge  which  Chesterton 
makes  against  Carlyle,  that  he  had  no  belief  in 
the  people,  no  belief  in  the  elementary  instincts 
of  the  masses  of  men ;  that  he  assumed  that  his 
message  was  in  advance  of  them,  that  he  could 
be  nothing  else  than  a  voice  crying  in  the  wilder- 
ness. And  so,  rather  than  change  the  pitch  of 
his  voice,  he  remained  in  his  wilderness,  and  in 
fact  got  rather  to  like  being  there.  Now  merely 
to  be  a  prophet,  merely  to  fling  thunderbolts  of 
truth  at  people,  is,  in  essential  matters,  to  have 
given  up  the  whole  business.  Our  Lord  said  of  a 
great  moral  teacher  of  His  day  that  he  was  more 
than  a  prophet :  I  believe  He  meant  that  he  was 
a  good  man.  "  There  are  two  main  moral 
necessities  for  the  work  of  a  great  man,"  says 
Chesterton,   speaking  of  Carlyle :    "  the   first  is 


TERTIUM  QUID  105 

that  he  should  believe  in  the  truth  of  his  message  ; 
the  second  is  that  he  should  believe  in  the  accept- 
ability of  his  message.  It  was  the  whole  tragedy 
of  Carlyle  that  he  had  the  first  and  not  the 
second.  ...  It  was  this  simplicity  of  confidence, 
not  only  in  God,  but  in  the  image  of  God,  that  was 
lacking  in  Carlyle." 

I  seem  to  see  everywhere  in  Chesterton,  and 
this  is  in  my  own  view  the  explanation  of  his 
entire  literary  manner,  a  kind  of  passion  to  be 
understood.  His  critics  are  perhaps  quite  right 
in  saying  that  he  chose  his  manner  in  order  to 
startle  people  into  reading  him.  I  should  not 
put  it  that  way ;  though  I  think  there  is  some- 
thing in  it.  Chesterton  would  hold,  I  believe, 
as  indeed  we  have  quoted,  that  whatever  is  true 
is  a  thing  that  should  be  known,  and  known  by 
as  many  people  as  possible.  Truth  is  public 
property.  One  of  our  human  and  social  duties 
is  to  communicate  the  truth  to  one  another.  He 
would  say  that  a  man  has  not  got  hold  of  truth 
who  sets  out  with  the  idea  that  people  will  not 
hear  it.  That,  on  the  contrary,  it  is  the  first 
business  of  a  man  who  has  anything  to  say  that 
he  shall  say  it  in  such  a  way  that  the  people, 
the  common  people,  the  people   who  are   most 


io6  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

directly  to  be  affected,  shall  become  aware  of  it. 
A  man  gets  a  sight  of  truth  not  simply  in 
order  that  he  may  embody  it  in  words  that 
please  himself,  but  that  he  may  embody  it  in 
such  words  as  shall  give  it  its  greatest  immediate 
reach ;  and  so  Dante  writes  his  Divine  Comedy 
in  the  lingua  franca,  in  the  speech  of  the  common 
people  ;  Luther  translates  the  Bible  into  German  ; 
and,  if  I  may  dare  the  comparison,  Chesterton 
makes  use  of  good-humour,  ridiculous  illustrations, 
in  order,  if  you  like  to  put  it  so,  to  get  a  hearing 
— in  order,  as  I  prefer  to  put  it,  to  get  his  message 
delivered  to  the  proper  quarter.  *'  There  are 
those,"  he  says  somewhere,  "who  declare  that 
they  have  no  doubt  the  Salvation  Army  is  right 
in  its  aims,  but  they  very  much  dislike  its 
methods.  On  the  other  hand,  I  have  my  doubts 
about  its  aims,  but  I  have  no  doubt  at  all  about 
its  methods  ;  these  are  obviously  right."  For,  he 
goes  on  to  say,  there  must  always  be  something 
corybantic  about  religion,  about  the  announce- 
ment of  truth.  The  conclusion  of  this  whole 
matter  we  might  put  in  an  image,  not  of  Chester- 
ton's own,  but  not  unlike  many  a  one  of  his. 

If  a  man  gets  up  on  a  lorry  at  a  street  corner 
and    begins   to  hammer  a   huge  gong  so  that 


TERTIUM  QUID  107 

everybody  is  compelled  to  look  in  his  direction ; 
if  he  lays  down  the  gong  and  takes  up  a  bell, 
and  rings  it  violently  so  that  a  crowd  gathers,  you 
must  not  conclude  that  he  is  a  mountebank.  He 
may  be  a  man  who  has  something  to  say.  He 
may  indeed  be  one  of  those  men  to  whom  the 
world  has  all  along  owed  so  much,  who  imagine 
that  unless  the  people  who  are  passing  stop  and 
listen  to  him  they  will  in  various  ways  go  to  the 
devil.  Recollecting  the  great  and  even  tremend- 
ous figures  in  history,  it  is  only  fair  to  wait  until 
we  hear  him  say  what  he  has  to  say  ;  not  to 
condemn  him  by  the  grotesqueness  of  his  appear- 
ance, remembering,  say,  John  the  Baptist ;  or  by 
something  in  his  voice  that  jars  ;  but  judging  him, 
if  we  must  judge  him,  by  the  manifest  passion 
which,  as  he  goes  on  speaking,  begins  to  kindle 
within  him  and  to  sway  his  words,  and  by  the 
fire  which,  by  a  profound  and  unconquerable 
affinity,  begins  to  kindle  in  our  hearts  as  we  listen 
to  him.  For  in  our  day  also,  as  in  the  days  of 
Elijah,  fire  is  the  sign  of  God. 

Still  working  our  way  into  the  substance  of 
Mr.  Chesterton's  philosophy,  let  me  deal  here — 
it  can  only  be  in  a  hurried  way — with  another 
feature  of  his  work  which  has  been  declared  to 


io8  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

be  an  offence.  The  common  criticism  of  Chester- 
ton is  that  he  is  always  striving  after  paradox. 
That  criticism,  you  observe,  resolves  itself  into 
two  separate  charges.  The  first  is,  that  he 
strives ;  the  second  is,  that  the  conclusions  at 
which  he  arrives  are  always  paradoxical.  With 
regard  to  the  first — namely,  that  Chesterton  strives 
after  paradox — I  think  it  very  manifestly  unfair. 
I  am  quite  sure  that,  on  the  contrary,  his  greatest 
artistic  difficulty  is  to  keep  back  the  paradoxes 
which  are  crowding  down  to  the  point  of  his  pen. 
Mr.  Chesterton  never  affects  me  as  striving  after 
anything.  It  often  happens  with  him,  indeed, 
that  he  sees  what  is  going  to  be  the  conclusion  of 
his  reasoning  long  before  he  has  quite  established 
it,  and  down  it  goes  in  all  its  crudeness  long  before 
he  has  prepared  us  for  it.  But  that  he  strives 
after  such  effects  never  once  occurred  to  me.  A 
man  does  not  need  to  strive  after  that  particular 
way  of  expressing  himself  which  he  has  practised 
consistently  in  every  line  of  his  writing,  extending 
now  over  as  much  literary  matter  as  would  fill  a 
small  library.  It  is  quite  as  natural  for  him  to  be 
picturesque  as  it  is  for  a  great  many  of  us — not  to 
be.  It  is  as  natural  for  him  to  be  violent  and 
excessive  and  uproarious  as  it  is  for  other  writers 


TERTIUM  QUID  109 

to  be  timid  and  futile  and  lady-like.  It  is  as 
natural  for  him  to  arrive  at  paradoxes  as  it  is 
for  more  solemn  writers  to  arrive  at  platitudes. 
Indeed,  there  are  perhaps  only  two  conclusions  to 
which  all  serious  consideration  of  life  can  lead 
us — either  to  the  uttering  of  a  platitude,  a  truism, 
or  to  the  uttering  of  a  paradox,  the  discovery,  i.e., 
of  a  certain  impassable  chasm  between  subject  and 
object,  between  things  and  the  indomitable  spirit 
of  a  man.  I  repeat,  that  what  gives  the  impres- 
sion of  striving  and  posing  to  Chesterton's  entire 
style  is  this  :  he  sees  at  a  glance  the  principle  of 
the  matter  in  hand,  and  then,  without  thinking 
further,  embodies  it  in  a  very  crude  and  haphazard 
illustration  or  figure.  He  knows — and  it  is  this 
which  makes  his  method  quite  legitimate — that  if 
his  thought  is  really  right,  then  this  illustration 
which  he  has  created  will  bring  out  certain  aspects 
or  corroborations  which  he  could  not  have  stated 
with  such  concreteness  of  definition  if  he  had 
restricted  himself  to  the  language  of  pure  thought. 
There  is  nothing  more  characteristic  of  his  style 
than  this :  that  an  image  or  figure  which  he  has 
flung  down  begins  to  mean  more  and  more  for 
himself — begins  to  clarify  his  own  intermediate 
processes,  and  to  give  edge  and  eloquence  to  his 


no 


ANCESTRAL  VOICES 


contention.  In  this,  as  in  many  other  matters,  it 
is  easy  to  trace  the  great  influence  of  Browning 
upon  Chesterton.  Carlyle  tells  us,  in  one  of  his 
translations  of  Tieck,  of  a  baron  who  needed  to 
jump  back  and  forward  over  a  table  in  order  to 
get  himself  into  a  good  humour.  Some  men  with 
the  same  object  in  view — I  mean,  in  order  to 
warm  up  their  mind — take  cold  baths  ;  some  take 
hard  walks  over  the  hills ;  some  drink  strong 
coffee :  Chesterton  confronts  his  own  mind  with 
violent  and  unlikely  situations.  Let  me  give  an 
illustration  which,  if  we  had  time,  we  should  find 
to  cast  light  upon  all  these  points,  and  especially 
upon  this  point,  that  Chesterton's  mind  works 
most  easily  under  the  stimulus  of  an  apparently 
intractable  metaphor  or  concrete  illustration,  and 
that  the  illustration  which  seems  far-fetched,  so 
that  people  accuse  him  of  striving  after  it,  begins 
to  fall  back  again  into  the  living  context  of  the 
man's  thought.  **  Suppose  that  a  great  commo- 
tion arises  in  the  street  about  something,  let  us 
say  a  lamp-post  which  many  influential  persons 
desire  to  pull  down.  A  grey-clad  monk,  who  is 
the  spirit  of  the  Middle  Ages,  is  approached  upon 
the  matter,  and  begins  to  say,  in  the  arid  manner 
of  the  Schoolmen,  '  Let  us  first  of  all  consider,  my 


TERTIUM  QUID  III 

brethren,  the  value  of  light.  If  light  be  in  itself 
good.  .  .  .'  At  this  point  he  is  somewhat 
excusably  knocked  down.  All  the  people  make 
a  rush  for  the  lamp-post.  The  lamp-post  is  down 
in  ten  minutes,  and  they  go  about  congratulating 
each  other  on  their  un-mediseval  practicality. 
But  as  things  go  on,  they  do  not  work  out  so 
easily.  Some  people  have  pulled  the  lamp-post 
down  because  they  wanted  the  electric  light ; 
some  because  they  wanted  old  iron  ;  some  because 
they  wanted  darkness,  because  their  deeds  were 
evil ;  some  thought  it  not  enough  of  a  lamp-post, 
some  too  much  ;  some  acted  because  they  wanted 
to  smash  municipal  machinery ;  some  because 
they  wanted  to  smash  something.  And  there  is 
war  in  the  night,  no  man  knowing  whom  he 
strikes.  So  gradually  and  inevitably — to-day,  to- 
morrow, or  the  next  day — there  comes  back  the 
conviction  that  the  monk  was  right  after  all,  and 
that  all  depends  on  what  is  the  philosophy  of 
light.  Only,  what  we  might  have  discovered 
under  the  gas-lamp,  we  now  must  discuss  in  the 
dark  "  {Heretics). 

I  detect  no  evidence  of  striving,  or  posing,  or 
intellectual  levity  in  an  illustration  of  that  kind : 
and  it  is  one  of  probably  tens  of  thousands.     I  saw 


112  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

that  someone  the  other  day  wrote  an  article  in  a 
newspaper  full  of  veiled  disparagement  of  Chester- 
ton. The  writer  insinuated  that  it  was  simply  a 
kind  of  trick  such  as  he  himself  and  some  other 
people  could  easily  affect  if  they  had  the  mind  to. 
I  recall  that  that  was  the  very  condition  on  which 
Charles  Lamb  said  a  certain  man  could  write  the 
plays  of  Shakespeare — "  if  he  had  had  the  mind." 
But  seriously,  I  wish  some  of  those  modest  men 
would  come  out  of  their  hiding-places  and  augment 
the  great  tide  of  speculative  joy  and  fundamental 
confidence  in  life  which  Mr.  Chesterton  has  done 
so  much  to  raise.  I  should  say  of  most  of  us  what 
he  himself  says  of  people  who  thought  they  could 
easily  have  written  some  of  the  easy-going  but 
inevitable  pages  of  Dickens  :  **  Perhaps  we  could 
have  created  Mr.  Guppy,  but  the  effort  would 
certainly  have  exhausted  us :  we  should  be  ever 
afterwards  wheeled  about  in  a  bath-chair  at 
Bournemouth." 

It  is  perfectly  true  that  Chesterton  sees  truth  in 
paradox ;  but  it  is  no  merely  literary  form  with 
him.  The  style  here  is  the  man  ;  and  to  Chester- 
ton truth  is  found  by  beings  such  as  we  are,  and 
placed  as  we  are,  only  in  the  guise  of  paradox.  I 
cannot  attempt  to  justify   Chesterton's  position 


TERTIUM  QUID  113 

here,  or  even  to  illustrate  it,  though  if  one  had 
time  it  would  be  an  easy  matter  to  show  that  we 
are  all  quite  familiar  with  what  he  means,  and  that 
it  is  our  own  habitual  and  unconscious  attitude 
towards  life  and  experience.  But  take,  for 
example,  such  words  as  faith  and  hope  and  love. 
It  is  the  very  nature  of  faithy  that  it  comes  into 
play  only  with  regard  to  matters  which  from 
certain  other  points  of  view  and  on  other  categories 
are  unbelievable.  There  is  and  there  must  always 
be  an  opposition  between  the  intuitions  of  faith 
and  those  materials  and  conclusions  with  which 
our  merely  intellectual  faculty  deals.  The  truth 
is,  as  Hegel  said,  "  in  a  relationship."  In  this  total 
world,  there  is  room  for  faith  as  there  is  room  for 
reason,  but  they  deal  with  life  on  different  grades, 
and  with  different  ends  in  view.  So  the  very 
nature  of  hope,  which  Mr.  Chesterton  so  thought- 
fully describes  as  "the  irreducible  minimum  of  the 
spirit,"  is  that  it  goes  beyond  experience,  and  if  need 
be  contradicts  experience.  In  Mr.  Watts'  well- 
known  picture,  what  is  "Hope"?  It  is  the 
figure  of  a  woman,  blindfolded,  sitting  on  the  circle 
of  the  earth.  In  her  hand  she  holds  an  instrument 
of  music.  She  has  struck  one  string,  and  it  has 
broken  at  her  touch ;  she  has  struck  another,  and 


114  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

it  too  has  snapped.  One  chord  remains.  It  alone, 
it  at  last,  must  stand  the  strain  and  challenge  of 
her  touch.  From  it  the  music  must  come,  else 
there  is  no  music  in  this  world  at  all.  That  is 
hope.  Though  one  chord  and  another  has  given 
way,  has  snapped  under  the  test ;  though  only  one 
thread  remains  as  ground  and  reason  for  this 
invincible  instinct  of  the  soul,  she  prepares  to 
strike,  knowing  that  the  last  chord  will  not  fail. 
So  too,  the  very  nature  of  love  is,  that  it  goes  out 
towards  the  unlovely,  towards  those  who  at 
present  seem  incapable  of  appreciating  or  under- 
standing love. 

Paradox  in  literature  has  its  counterpart  in  the 
antinomies  of  philosophy — which  represent  the 
farthest  and  deepest  insight  possible  to  us  into 
the  region  of  reality.  Recollecting  the  ill-success 
which  attended  Mr.  Haldane's  ingenuous  effort, 
on  a  recent  and  notorious  occasion,  to  enlighten 
the  mind  of  a  Lord  Chancellor  on  the  antinomies 
of  Free  Will  and  Predestination,  I  shall  not  abuse 
your  patience,  though  really  the  whole  matter  is 
not  so  very  difficult.  It  is  one  which  was  very 
accurately  appreciated  by  the  religious  people  of 
Scotland  for  two  centuries,  and  ought  not  to  have 
been  beyond  the  dialectical  skill  of  Lord  Halsbury. 


TERTIUM  QUID  115 

I  must  content  myself  with  repeating  that  paradox 
in  literature  is  simply  the  expression  of  that 
apparent  conflict  between  subject  and  object  and 
yet  that  necessary  relationship  between  subject 
and  object  which  marks  the  boundary  of  our 
philosophical  vision. 

Now  it  is  no  part  of  Mr.  Chesterton's  ambition 
to  remain  in  the  clouds.  Having  discovered  in 
the  clouds  the  nature  of  paradox,  or  having  pursued 
it  into  the  clouds,  having  seen  in  the  loneliness  of 
his  own  most  accomplished  mind  that  truth  must 
always  have  this  paradoxical  expression,  he  sees 
it  everywhere,  and  discovers  it  to  us,  for  our  joy, 
and  to  keep  off  the  dreadful  tyranny  of  the  merely 
scientific  category.  Taking  the  large  question  of 
life  itself,  he  sees,  like  Tolstoy,  like  Carlyle,  like 
every  true  and  resolute  thinker,  that  life  is  a  much 
earlier  thing  than  thought ;  that  we  live  before  we 
reason ;  that  to  this  day  the  really  great  and 
characteristic  things  which  we  do,  we  do  not  at 
the  dictate  of  our  cool  intellectual  faculty,  but  in 
obedience  to  primitive  and  unfathomable  instincts, 
appetites,  desires,  ideals,  faiths.  Seeing  that  this 
is  so,  Chesterton  rejoices  to  point  out  to  the  soul 
of  man  its  inviolable  way  of  escape. 

All  this  brings  us,  late  perhaps,  and  circuitously, 


Il6  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

to  what  we  must  call  the  message  of  Mr.  Chester- 
ton ;  for,  as  he  himself  defines  it,  "paradox  simply 
means  a  certain  defiant  joy  which  belongs  to 
belief." 

To  put  the  matter  in  as  short  compass  as 
possible,  leaving  it  to  be  modified  in  our  own 
minds  as  we  proceed,  Mr.  Chesterton  is  the  pro- 
tagonist in  our  particular  day  of  the  natural  man. 
He  has  been  chosen  by  virtue  of  his  tempera- 
ment, by  virtue  of  the  fortunate  emergence  in  him 
of  certain  primitive  faculties  which  in  most  men 
of  his  condition  have  been  rendered  impotent  or 
untrustworthy — he  has  been  chosen  to  champion 
the  rights  of,  so  to  call  him,  the  average  and 
catholic  man.  If  the  phrase  were  not  so  loaded 
with  both  a  sinister  and  a  merely  affected  con- 
notation, we  should  say  that  his  message  is  to 
call  us  back  (or,  as  he  would  say,  forward)  to  the 
joys  and  the  duties  and  the  faith  of  the  natural 
life.  The  life  of  nature  as  man's  sphere  is,  in 
Chesterton's  view,  something  very  different  from 
a  merely  animal  life,  without  social  restraints 
or  without  those  equally  fundamental  restraints 
which  the  wisdom  of  the  race  has  discovered  and 
approved.  In  his  view,  and  as  he  himself  might 
put  it,  the  only  thing  in  man  which  is  as  obstinate 


TERTIUM  QUID  117 

as  his  love  of  liberty  is  his  love  of  bondage.  The 
only  thing  that  man  will  do  as  inevitably  as  he 
will  live  a  merely  animal  life,  is  that  he  will  repent 
and  put  himself  in  irons.  The  only  thing  which 
is  as  true  of  man  as  that  he  is  made  of  clay,  is 
that  into  that  clay,  by  some  unfathomable  mystery, 
a  Holy  God  has  infused  something  of  His  own. 
It  is  this  man  whose  nature,  which  bears  within 
itself  traces  of  much  besides  its  lower  status, 
which  bears  within  itself  evidences  of  its  long  and 
hazardous  journey,  and  of  its  difficult  and  precious 
enlightenment — it  is  this  natural  man,  in  the  sense 
oi unsophisticated  v!\2.xv,  whose  total  soul  Chesterton 
celebrates  and  defends. 

And  arriving  at  the  moment  when  he  has 
arrived,  Chesterton  has  acquired  the  quality  of 
greatness.  For  a  great  man  in  these  matters  is 
a  man  who  arrives  at  the  right  moment,  who 
comes  to  the  rescue  of  that  in  man  which  at  the 
moment  is  threatened  yet  which  must  not  be  lost. 
I  hail  him  as  a  great  writer  when  I  consider  the 
great  temptation  of  the  hour  with  which  he  deals. 
That  man  in  his  measure  is  a  great  man  whose 
word  has  the  effect  of  reassuring  us,  just  as  that 
writer  is  a  bad  writer  who  disposes  his  readers 
to  stucumb.     Anything  is  bad  which  disheartens 


ii8  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

us  on  our  predestined  journey.  Anything  is  bad 
which  raises  a  suspicion  as  to  the  value  of  our 
existence.  Anything  is  bad  which  would  lead 
us  to  disparage  the  human  enterprise.  Any- 
thing is  bad  which  would  make  us  let  our  hands 
fall  and  our  knees  shake,  face  to  face  with  our 
elementary  duties  and  responsibilities,  and  face 
to  face  with  our  own  ignorance  and  the  darkness 
that  lies  about  us.  Anything  is  bad  which  makes 
us  regret  life.  All  laughter  at  man  is  hollow  and 
of  the  devil.  The  account  of  man  which  is  thrust 
upon  us  by  a  hasty  and  dogmatic  materialism  is, 
from  the  point  of  view  of  man's  instincts,  and 
from  the  point  of  view  of  the  highest  words  he 
has  ever  obeyed,  a  form  of  laughter  at  man.  As 
such  it  is  bad,  a  thing  it  may  even  be  to  be  put 
down  one  day,  as  witchcraft  was  put  down,  and 
for  the  same  reason — that  it  is  seducing  man  from 
his  true  and  normal  and  natural  life. 

One  general  line  of  criticism  which  Chesterton 
applies  to  those  tendencies  in  modern  life  and 
thought  which  in  his  view  threaten  that  deposit 
of  faith  on  which  man  has  come  thus  far,  is  this. 
He  convicts  the  opponent  with  whom  he  is  deal- 
ing at  the  moment  of  neglecting  some  fact  of  the 
human  soul  which  is  just  as  trustworthy,  just  as 


TERTIUM  QUID  119 

inalienable  to  man,  as  is  the  faculty  on  which  the 
threatening  theory  is  basing  itself.  In  short,  in 
Chesterton's  view,  the  specialists  are  always  wrong 
when  they  leave  their  own  particular  field  and 
impose  their  methods  on  what  he  would  call  "  the 
rich  and  reeking  human  personality."  He  would 
say :  You  cannot  exhaust  all  the  qualities  of  a 
man.  You  cannot  really  sum  him  up.  You  can 
only  examine  him  in  the  abstract.  But  then  he 
does  not  exist  in  the  abstract.  You  can  examine 
him  only  after  he  is  dead.  All  your  reports  about 
man  are  therefore  of  the  nature  of  post-mortem 
reports ;  they  have  nothing  to  say  as  to  the  very 
thing  which  is  of  most  importance — life  itself. 
This,  which  is  true  of  man,  considered  physio- 
logically, is  true  likewise  of  him  considered  as  a 
sentient  being.  Take,  for  example,  the  nature 
of  personal  happiness,  or  joy.  You  may  make 
out  a  list  of  circumstances  which  ought  to  ensure 
this  joy ;  and  you  may  be  all  wrong.  You  may 
surround  a  man,  like  Carlyle's  shoeblack,  with  all 
those  circumstances,  and  yet  leave  him  miserable. 
You  may  see,  on  the  other  hand,  a  human  being 
in  rags  and  difficulties,  with  none  of  the  circum- 
stances which  according  to  your  inventory  secure 
human  joy.     You  may  conclude  that  you  are  in 


I20  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

the  presence  of  a  miserable  creature ;  whereas 
you  may  be  in  the  presence  of  one  who  is  in  love, 
and  therefore  delirious  with  human  faith  and  con- 
fidence in  the  value  of  existence.  Or  you  adduce 
your  reasons  for  denying  to  man  his  imperishable 
confidence  in  a  will  beyond  his  own — in  short,  in 
God.  You  may  forecast  his  inevitable  doom,  to 
perish  like  the  beasts  ;  but 

"Just  when  you're  safest,  there  is  a  sunset  touch, 
A  fancy  from  a  flower-bell,  some  one's  death, 
A  chorus-ending  from  Euripides  ; 
And  that's  enough  for  fifty  hopes  and  fears 
As  old  and  new  at  once  as  Nature's  self.  .  .  ." 

Chesterton  would  test  every  theory  or  proposi- 
tion by  its  fitness  to  satisfy,  or  to  control  for  a 
higher  exercise,  some  ineradicable  endowment  of 
man — of  man  as  we  know  him,  in  his  glory  and 
gloom  alike,  but  above  everything  in  his  altogether 
divine  perseverance  in  life.  He  would  arraign 
all  systems  which  invade  man's  sanctuary  of 
feeling  and  desire  and  faith,  as  he  would  arraign 
a  brother  man  accused  of  some  crime  against 
man's  nature  or  the  social  compact — he  would 
arraign  them  all  before  a  jury  of  common 
men. 

"  The  trend  of  our  epoch  up  to  this  time  has  been  con- 
sistently towards  specialism  and  professionalism.     We  tend  to 


TERTIUM  QUID  I2i 

have  trained  soldiers  because  they  fight  better,  trained  singers 
because  they  sing  better,  trained  dancers  because  they  dance 
better,  especially  instructed  laughers  because  they  laugh  better, 
and  so  on  and  so  on.  The  principle  has  been  applied  to  law 
and  politics  by  innumerable  modern  writers.  Many  Fabians 
have  insisted  that  a  greater  part  of  our  political  work  should 
be  performed  by  experts.  Many  legalists  have  declared  that 
the  untrained  jury  should  be  altogether  supplanted  by  the 
trained  judge. 

"Now  if  this  world  of  ours  were  really  what  is  called 
reasonable,  I  do  not  know  that  there  would  be  any  fault  to 
find  with  this.  But  the  true  result  of  all  experience  and  the 
true  foundation  of  all  religion  is  this — that  the  four  or  five 
things  that  it  is  most  practically  essential  that  a  man  should 
know  are  all  of  them  what  people  call  paradoxes.  That  is  to 
say,  that  though  we  all  find  them  in  life  to  be  mere  plain 
truths,  yet  we  cannot  easily  state  them  in  words  without  being 
guilty  of  seeming  verbal  contradictions.  One  of  them,  for 
instance,  is  the  unimpeachable  platitude  that  the  man  who 
finds  most  pleasure  for  himself  is  often  the  man  who  least 
hunts  ifor  it.  Another  is  the  paradox  of  courage  :  the  fact 
that  the  way  to  avoid  death  is  not  to  have  too  much  aversion 
to  it.  Whoever  is  careless  enough  of  his  bones  to  climb  some 
hopeless  cliff  above  the  tide  may  save  his  bones  by  that  care- 
lessness. Whoever  will  lose  his  life,  the  same  shall  save  it : 
an  entirely  practical  and  prosaic  statement. 

"  Now  one  of  these  four  or  five  paradoxes  which  should  be 
taught  to  every  infant  prattling  at  his  mother's  knee  is  the 
following :  That  the  more  a  man  looks  at  a  thing  the  less  he 
can  see  it,  and  the  more  a  man  learns  a  thing  the  less  he  knows 
it.  The  Fabian  argument  of  the  expert,  that  the  man  who  is 
trained  should  be  the  man  who  is  trusted,  would  be  absolutely 
unanswerable  if  it  were  really  true  that  a  man  who  studied  a 
thing  and  practised  it  every  day  went  on  seeing  more  and 
more  of  its  significance.     But  he  does  not.     He  goes  on  see- 


122  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

ing  less  and  less  of  its  significance.  In  the  same  way,  alas, 
we  all  go  on  every  day,  unless  we  are  continually  goading 
ourselves  into  gratitude  and  humility,  seeing  less  and  less  of 
the  significance  of  the  sky  or  the  stones. 

"  Now  it  is  a  terrible  business  to  mark  a  man  out  for  the 
vengeance  of  men.  But  it  is  a  thing  to  which  a  man  can 
grow  accustomed,  as  he  can  to  other  terrible  things :  he  can 
even  grow  accustomed  to  the  sun.  And  the  horrible  thing 
about  all  legal  officials,  even  the  best,  about  all  judges,  magi- 
strates, barristers,  detectives,  and  policemen,  is  not  that  they 
are  wicked  (some  of  them  are  good),  not  that  they  are  stupid 
(several  of  them  are  quite  intelligent) — it  is  simply  that  they 
have  got  used  to  it. 

•'  Strictly,  they  do  not  see  the  prisoner  in  the  dock  :  all  they 
see  is  the  usual  man  in  the  usual  place.  They  do  not  see  the 
awful  court  of  judgment :  they  only  see  their  own  workshop. 
Therefore  the  instinct  of  Christian  civilisation  has  most  wisely 
declared  that  into  their  judgments  there  shall  upon  every 
occasion  be  infused  fresh  blood  and  fresh  thoughts  from  the 
street.  Men  shall  come  in  who  can  see  the  court  and  the 
crowd,  the  coarse  faces  of  the  policemen  and  the  professional 
criminals,  the  wasted  faces  of  the  wastrels,  the  unreal  faces  of 
the  gesticulating  counsel,  and  see  it  all  as  one  sees  a  new 
picture  or  a  ballet  hitherto  unvisited. 

"  Our  civilisation  has  decided,  and  very  justly  decided,  that 
determining  the  guilt  or  innocence  of  men  is  a  thing  too  im- 
portant to  be  trusted  to  trained  men.  If  it  wishes  for  light 
upon  that  awful  matter,  it  asks  men  who  know  no  more  law 
than  I  know,  but  who  can  feel  the  things  that  I  felt  in  the 
jury-box.  When  it  wants  a  library  catalogued,  or  the  solar 
system  discovered,  or  any  trifle  of  that  kind,  it  uses  up  its 
specialists.  But  when  it  wishes  anything  done  which  is  really 
serious,  it  collects  twelve  of  the  ordinary  men  standing  round. 
The  same  thing  was  done,  if  I  remember  right,  by  the  Founder 
of  Christianity." 


TERTIUM  QUID  123 

Mr.  Chesterton,  like  every  other  who  would 
aid  the  human  soul,  has  not  delivered  his  message 
in  so  many  philosophical  principles.  He  does 
not  speak  or  write  in  vacuo,  but  with  his  eye 
upon  some  threatening  spirit  of  our  time.  And 
— at  least  so  it  seems  to  me — he  has  a  faultless 
eye  for  the  moment  when  any  tendency  is  begin- 
ning to  assail  the  abiding  interest  of  man. 
Therefore  he  has  been  compelled  to  deliver  his 
message  in  the  way  of  criticism  and  opposition  to 
tendencies  in  thought  or  speculation,  and  in  life, 
which  seem  to  him  likely  to  seduce  man  from  the 
main  highway  of  healthy  and  natural  and  believ- 
ing life  on  which  alone  he  is  equal  to  himself  and 
secure.  Even  as  the  angel  measured  the  founda- 
tions of  the  Heavenly  Jerusalem,  so  Chesterton 
measures  and  tests  the  principles,  the  effects  for 
man's  present  moral  practice  and  his  outlook, 
of  certain  ways  of  looking  at  life — he  tests  them 
all  "according  to  the  measure  of  a  man,  i.e.  of 
the  angel."  And  therein  also  lies  his  confidence. 
The  human  soul  he  sees  too  firmly  rooted  in 
essential  things,  too  firmly  persuaded  of  the 
essential  good  of  life,  to  be  disturbed  for  more 
than  a  period  from  its  true  career.  As  Abraham 
Lincoln   said — ^and   it  is  the  very  quality  of  all 


124  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

great  words  to  serve  greater  causes  than  their 
first  cause — "  you  may  deceive  some  people  all 
the  time,  and  all  the  people  for  some  time ;  but 
never  all  the  people  all  the  time." 

Man  has  seen  what  he  has  seen ;  and  never 
can  he  be  as  though  he  had  not  seen  it.  And, 
Chesterton  would  add,  man  has  seen  Christ ;  and 
would  rejoice  with  the  dying  Marius  in  Pater's 
great  work  (Pater,  whom  alone,  as  it  seems  to 
me,  Chesterton  does  less  than  justice  to),  that  in 
Jesus  Christ  there  has  been  erected  in  this  world 
a  plea,  a  standard,  an  afterthought  which  man- 
kind will  always  have  in  reserve  against  any 
wholly  mean  or  mechanical  theory  of  himself  and 
his  conditions. 

In  the  course  of  his  intellectual  career  so  far, 
Chesterton  has  dealt  with  some  of  the  chief 
doctrines  for  man  which  have  been  urged  upon 
us  in  the  name  of  enlightenment  during  the  last 
generation.  *'  Heresies  "  he  calls  these  doctrines  ; 
and  this  not  because  they  conflict  with  the  theo- 
logical propositions  of  the  Church,  but  because, 
if  accepted,  they  would  seduce  and  ultimately 
destroy  the  soul  of  man  as  it  has  come  to  be  and 
as  we  know  it.  Pessimism,  with  its  strange  and 
insane  joy  in  its  own  success,  he  finds  tolerable  as 


TERTIUM  QUID  125 

a  system  of  thought  only  so  long  as  you  take  care 
that  it  never  be  translated  into  life  and  action ; 
for  if  pessimism  be  true,  then  death  is  the  only 
proper  pursuit  of  man.  "  The  popularity  of  pure 
and  unadulterated  pessimism  is,"  he  says,  "an 
oddity.  It  is  almost  a  contradiction  in  terms. 
Men  would  no  more  receive  the  news  of  the 
failure  of  existence  or  of  the  harmonious  hostility 
of  the  stars  with  ardour  or  popular  rejoicing  than 
they  would  light  bonfires  for  the  arrival  of 
cholera,  or  dance  a  breakdown  when  they  were 
condemned  to  be  hanged." 

"The  pessimists  who  attack  the  universe  are 
always  under  this  disadvantage  :  they  have  an 
exhilarating  consciousness  that  they  could  make 
the  sun  and  moon  better;  but  they  also  have 
the  depressing  consciousness  that  they  could  not 
make  the  sun  and  moon  at  all." 

The  fact  is,  those  who  write  thus  gloomily 
about  life  considered  as  a  whole,  are  usually 
comfortable  above  the  average  lot  in  some  par- 
ticular of  their  life  which  they  take  care  not  to 
lose.  "  Existence  has  been  praised  and  absolved 
by  a  chorus  of  pessimists.  The  work  of  giving 
thanks  to  heaven  is,  as  it  were,  ingeniously 
divided  among   them.  .  .  .   Omar   Khayydm   is 


126  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

established  in  the  cellar  and  swears  that  it  is  the 
only  room  in  the  house.  .  .  .  Even  the  blackest 
of  pessimistic  writers  enjoys  his  art.  At  the 
precise  moment  that  he  has  written  some  shame- 
less and  terrible  indictment  of  creation,  his  one 
pang  of  joy  in  the  achievement  joins  the  universal 
chorus  of  gratitude  with  the  scent  of  the  wild 
flower  and  the  song  of  the  bird." 

It  is  because  Atheism  conflicts  with  an  instinct 
of  the  soul  which  has  been  enticed  and  corrobor- 
ated and  purified  by  human  experience,  that 
Chesterton  assails  it  and  predicts  its  failure  to 
tyrannise  over  men.  It  is  because  a  doctrinaire 
Socialism  is  contrary  to  the  heights  and  depths  of 
man's  soul,  because  it  would  restrict  man  to  a 
tame  paddock,  man  who  has  something  in  him 
which  hungers  for  the  risks  of  hazardous  and 
unequal  living,  that  Chesterton  has  no  fear  that 
it  will  ever  be  embraced.  It  is  because  Evolu- 
tion is  really  the  enemy  of  Revolution,  and 
because,  were  it  accepted  as  the  whole  truth  that 
we  are  fated  to  rise  in  the  scale,  we  should  all  sit 
down  and  wait  either  until  we  were  raised,  or 
cast  aside  to  make  room  for  another's  rising,  that 
Chesterton  is  afraid  of  Evolution.  It  is  because 
Puritanism  lays  emphasis  upon  the  spirit  in  man, 


TERTIUM  QUID  127 

that  he  celebrates  its  great  service  to  our  country. 
It  is  because  Puritanism  neglects  the  flesh  that 
he  condemns  it.  It  is  because  Medisevalism 
and  ^stheticism  find  their  happiness  in  looking 
backwards,  and  thus  cease  to  make  for  that  total 
victory  of  the  race  which  if  it  is  to  be  anywhere 
must  lie  in  front  of  us  ;  it  is  because  many  writers 
do  not  see  that  in  their  little  plans  and  purposes 
for  men  they  are  often  playing  with  fire,  tamper- 
ing, as  Stevenson  says,  with  the  lock  which  holds 
down  all  sorts  of  sulphurous  and  subterranean 
things — that  Chesterton  lays  about  him  with  the 
ancient  sword  of  the  spirit. 

And  now,  I  must  content  myself  with  having 
written  these  things  in  appreciation  of  one  whom 
I  consider  a  very  great  and  constructive  force, 
altogether  on  the  side  of  man,  which  is  eventually 
on  the  side  of  God.  Recalling  his  general  line 
of  criticism,  I  should  say  it  is  what  pedants  would 
call  an  argumentum  ad  hominem.  Personally  I 
have  always  held  that  on  matters  of  prime  human 
importance  no  other  argument  tells  in  the  long  run 
except  the  argumentum  ad  hom,inem.  "  Humanly 
speaking,"  a  student  began.  "  My  dear  sir," 
said  his  professor,  "there's  no  other  way  of 
speaking." 


128  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

When  Tennyson  protests  against  the  material- 
istic doctrine  of  man,  he  protests  in  the  name  of 
a  warm  and  instinctive  desire  for  the  contrary. 
His  heart,  he  tells  us,  rises  up  like  a  man  in 
wrath.  In  fact,  he  simply  won't  have  it.  And 
really  no  theory  will  ever  establish  itself  in  the 
mind  of  man  if  his  gorge  simply  rises  against  it. 
When  Darwin's  Descent  of  Man  was  at  the 
height  of  its  popularity,  George  Gilfillan,  a 
popular  preacher  of  that  time  in  Dundee,  voiced 
the  opposition  in  quite  a  happy  phrase.  "  I 
won't  have  a  monkey  for  my  grandfather,"  said 
the  good  man.  Now  I  venture  to  think  that 
there  is  something  in  the  protest  which  will 
always  be  invincible.  And  really  it  is  something 
more  than  the  recoil  of  the  spirit  from  a  proposed 
degradation.  It  is  good  science  likewise.  The 
really  important  thing  for  us  is  not,  W^here  did  we 
come  from  ?  but,  Where  are  we  bound  for  } 

We  may  have  had  the  lowliest  of  origins.  The 
Bible  confesses  we  are  made  from  the  dust ; 
though  it  declares  that  it  was  God  who  made  us. 
The  point  is,  here  we  are,  and  we  are  not  tired  of 
rising,  if  we  may,  in  the  scale.  Now  there  must 
always  have  been  something  in  us  like  a  coiled- 
up  spring  which  urged  us  on  so  far,  leaving  many 


TERTIUM  QUID  129 

things  behind  which  belonged  to  our  more  lowly 
lot. 

When  the  present  German  Emperor  showed 
himself  able  to  dispense  with  Prince  Bismarck, 
when,  in  Sir  John  Tenniel's  phrase,  "  he  dropped 
the  pilot,"  we  all  concluded  that  there  was 
something  in  the  German  Emperor,  both  as  a 
man  and  as  a  ruler  of  men,  which  made  him 
equal  to  that.  It  is  quite  a  fair  thing  to  say,  by 
the  same  token,  that  there  must  always  have 
been  something  in  man,  something  which  was 
only  awaiting  its  opportunity,  that  enabled  man, 
in  a  word,  to  drop  his  tail. 

Number  Nine  of  the  King's  Regulations  for 
Officers  of  the  Navy  contains  these  words : 
*•  Every  officer  is  to  refrain  from  making  remarks 
or  passing  criticisms  on  the  conduct  or  orders  of 
his  superiors  which  may  tend  to  bring  them  into 
contempt,  and  is  to  avoid  saying  or  doing  any- 
thing which  might  discourage  the  men  or  render 
them  dissatisfied  with  their  condition  or  with  the 
service  on  which  they  are  or  may  be  employed." 

Chesterton  sees  the  human  soul,  arrived  thus 

far — not   without   difficulty.       He  sees  that  any 

fundamental  health  which  we  have  is  due  to  the 

power  which  is  still  within  us  of  the   Christian 

9 


I30  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

tradition  as  it  gives  an  issue  and  a  consecration 
to  the  fountain  of  our  natural  life. 

And  anyone  who  seriously  interferes  with  the 
foundations  of  the  soul,  with  the  particular  kind 
of  hardihood  which  has  become  intertwined  for 
ever  with  the  Cross  of  Christ,  Chesterton  sees 
as  a  rebel  or  a  traitor — as  a  heretic  in  the  sublime 
sense.  And  because  as  such  he  is  poisoning  the 
wells  of  all  sane  and  hearty  living,  and  cutting 
man  off  from  his  Source,  like  the  great  Florentine, 
Chesterton  would  appoint  him  a  place  in  hell. 


i 


VI 

THE  SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE 
Introductory 

MY  object  in  the  papers  which  follow  im- 
mediately is  to  get  down  beneath  the 
surface  of  our  life.  And  the  route  which  I  am 
going  to  take  is  to  follow  in  the  track  of  some 
strenuous  thinker  who,  it  seems  to  us,  as  we 
consider  everything,  was  fated,  it  may  even  have 
been  from  all  eternity,  to  taste  a  certain  moral 
loneliness,  and  to  report. 

Out  of  the  heart  of  a  people  there  is  thrust 
forth  from  time  to  time  one  who  by  virtue  of 
his  sensitiveness  and  experience  feels  things 
which  we  who  are  of  duller  apprehension  had 
not  seen,  or  had  forgotten.  And  yet  we  are 
so  made  that  when  a  man  of  true  insight,  of 
an  insight  cleansed  and  certified  by  suffering, 
tells  us  what  he  saw  and  what  he  felt,  there  is 


132  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

something  within  us  which  acknowledges  his 
story,  and  recognises  that  in  some  real  way  it 
is  our  story,  and  that  we  are  no  longer  living 
honourably,  if,  having  heard  that  story,  it  should 
be  denied  its  proper  influence  with  us. 

I  have  entitled  these  studies :  '*  The  Sense  of 
Sin  in  Great  Literature," 

Now,  though  I  have  no  wish  to  dally  over 
words,  I  should  like  to  say  what,  from  the  stand- 
point of  these  studies,  great  literature  shall  be  held 
to  be.  By  great  literature  I  mean,  now,  literature 
which  has  dealt  with  the  human  soul  at  such  a 
depth  and  with  such  purity  and  thoroughness  of 
vision  that  what  it  has  said  is  true,  and  will  be 
recognised  as  true  by  serious  souls  in  all  times. 

In  my  own  view  and  belief,  all  great  literature 
is  confessional.  Every  really  great  work  of  art 
is  the  display  of  personality.  This  is  not  to  say 
that  in  a  great  poem  or  drama,  for  example,  the 
writer  is  giving  us  the  facts  of  his  own  life ;  but 
it  is  to  say  that  in  a  great  poem  or  drama  the 
writer  is  isolating  some  mood  or  feeling  or  moral 
discovery  of  his  own,  and  is  there  brooding  over 
it,  pursuing  the  implications  of  it,  tracking  the 
roots  and  principles  of  it,  until  his  own  heart 
and  flesh  cry  out  with  a  cry  which  means  that 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     133 

in  the  last  agony  of  his  thinking  the  man  has 
found  nothing ;  or  that  in  the  last  agony  of  his 
thinking  he  has  found  God. 

When  the  children  of  Israel  were  crossing 
the  Jordan  on  their  first  entry  into  Canaan, 
Joshua  summoned  them  one  by  one  to  take  an 
oath  of  allegiance  to  the  God  who  had  so  far 
prospered  them.  This  they  did.  But  before 
dismissing  the  assembled  people,  Joshua,  we 
read,  erected  a  stone  in  the  presence  of  them 
all,  and  said,  "This  stone  hath  heard  your 
vow.  Therefore  it  shall  stand  there  for  ever 
as  a  witness  against  you,  lest  you  deny  your 
God." 

The  kind  of  literature  I  am  thinking  of  is  that 
kind  of  disclosure  of  the  soul  which,  because  it 
was  given  once  upon  a  time,  remains  for  ever 
as  an  afterthought,  a  plea,  a  standard  to  hold 
man  to  his  destiny.  For  man  will  not  consent 
for  more  than  a  time  to  be  less  than  he  has  been  ; 
and  that  is  not  enlightenment,  it  is  not,  properly 
speaking,  progress,  which  proposes  for  us  a  poorer 
moral  career.  Great  literature,  then,  I  shall  take 
to  mean  that  literature  which  deals  with  the  soul 
of  man  as  the  home  of  great  issues,  as  the 
meeting-place   of  the  seen  and  the   Unseen,  of 


134  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

the  occupations  of  time  and  the  recurring  pre- 
occupation of  eternity. 

I  know  that  in  speaking  so  pointedly  about 
the  sense  of  sin  I  may  be  thought  to  be  dealing 
with  matters  which  are  really  not  present  to 
people's  minds  in  our  day.  We  had  recently 
the  obiter  dictum  of  one  of  our  most  versatile 
men,  himself  no  enemy  of  faith,  that  "  men  are 
not  worrying  about  their  sins."  But  that  might 
very  well  be  reason  enough  for  some  things  being 
said  which  should  have  the  effect  of  reviving 
that  noble  disquietude.  And  besides,  we  must 
not  be  guided  by  what  men,  who  have  their 
own  interests  and  preoccupations,  perceive  or  do 
not  perceive.  We  must  be  guided  by  what  we 
believe  to  be  there,  whether  men  are  thinking 
about  it  or  not  thinking  about  it 

It  is  a  very  silly  thing  to  say  that  "  men  in 
our  day  are  not  worrying  about  their  sins,"  if 
you  mean  by  that,  that  therefore  they  are  not 
to  be  worried,  or  that  they  have  somehow  got 
beyond  the  need  for  worrying.  On  the  contrary, 
it  should  be  held  to  be  a  very  alarming  moral 
and  social  symptom  that  men  are  not  now  worry- 
ing over  matters  which  have  undoubtedly  worried 
men  in  all  times,  as  often  as  men  have  looked 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     135 

themselves  in  the  soul.  St.  Paul  in  his  day  was 
aware  that  great  masses  of  people  were  not 
worrying  about  their  sins.  He  spoke  of  them 
as  being  "past  feeling."  But  that  is  a  condition 
which  no  true  man  will  regard  as  a  desirable 
one  for  himself.  It  is  also  a  condition  which 
no  far-seeing  man  will  welcome  as  a  sound  one 
for  society.  To  say  that  men  in  our  day  are 
not  worrying  about  their  sins,  is  to  say  that  men 
are  satisfied  with  themselves  and  satisfied  with 
things  as  they  are.  And  that  is  simply  to  say 
that  such  men  are  no  longer  men,  no  longer  the 
instruments  of  God  for  better  things ;  which,  if 
history  in  the  long-run  means  anything,  means 
that  the  Mysterious  Force  whose  very  being 
and  passion  it  is  to  heighten  and  intensify  the 
Spirit  in  man,  will  one  day  take  from  these 
decadent  souls  their  high  responsibility. 

I  say,  we  are  to  be  guided  not  by  what  seems 
the  spirit  of  the  time.  We  are  to  be  guided 
by  what  is  there  all  the  time.  To  take  an 
illustration  from  a  disaster,  the  terror  of  which 
time  may  have  so  softened  as  to  make  the 
allusion  not  too  poignant.  As  the  Titanic  tore 
through  the  dark  waters  on  that  April  night  two 
years  ago,  the  passengers  and   the  crew   were 


136  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

not  worrying  about  ice.  A  thousand  things 
contributed  to  their  gaiety  and  absence  of  care. 
The  bright  lights,  the  general  opulence,  the 
hearty  faces,  the  music,  the  long  tradition  of 
safety ;  or,  if  one  bethought  himself  for  a  moment, 
there  were  the  life-boats  and  the  life-belts.  And 
besides,  the  night  was  calm.  Why  then  should 
anyone  worry?  And  no  one  did  worry.  Yet 
the  terrible  thing  was  there :  and  all  the  time 
the  ship  was  rushing  to  meet  its  unequal,  inex- 
orable foe.  But  consider  this  also :  earlier  in 
the  day  which  led  up  to  that  disastrous  night, 
a  message  had  been  borne  to  the  vessel  not  yet 
doomed ;  for  ships  and  souls  are  not  yet  doomed 
so  long  as  they  have  the  faculty  of  hearing. 
That  message,  that  report  and  rumour  out  of  the 
vast  sea,  had  reached  the  ship — had  fallen  indeed 
upon  the  ear  of  one  whose  very  function  it  was 
to  hear.  We  might  without  violence  use  words 
which  St  Paul  used  of  the  souls  of  men  and  say 
that  God  did  not  leave  that  ship  without  witness. 
Well,  "we  mortals  cross  this  ocean  of  a  world 
each  in  the  average  cabin  of  a  life."  As  we 
voyage  on, — and  surely  this  which  is  the  high 
interpretation  of  great  literature  is  the  true  one, — 
from  time  to  time,  by  the  way  of  elected  souls, 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     137 

voices  are  heard,  the  presence  of  threatening 
shapes  is  disclosed,  and  they,  captains  of  the 
soul,  have  it  imposed  upon  them,  so  that  it  is  a 
fire  in  their  bones  if  they  do  not  speak  out,  to 
declare  what  they  have  heard  and  to  testify  what 
they  have  seen. 

But  I  do  not  believe  that  "  men  to-day  are  not 
worrying  about  their  sins."  I  can  well  believe 
that  an  immense  number  of  people  are  not  think- 
ing about  their  sins ;  though  even  there  I  am 
probably  quite  at  fault.  But  even  were  it  true 
that  an  immense  number  of  people  are  not  think- 
ing about  their  sins,  it  is  equally  true  that  there 
is  an  immense  number  of  people,  it  may  even 
be  the  same  people,  who  are  not  thinking  about 
anything,  because  they  are  not  thinking  at  all. 
But  this  is  nothing  new  or  singular.  Every  man 
who  thinks  finds  that  he  has  to  think  for  others 
besides  himself.  Every  man  who  is  living  a 
spiritual  life  at  all  is  carrying  in  his  soul  the 
care  of  some  others.  And  if  there  are  immense 
numbers  who  are  not  thinking  seriously  about  life 
and  about  how  things  are  going,  the  responsibility 
is  simply  the  greater  that  those  who  are  morally 
sensitive  shall  in  a  day  of  unusual  carelessness  be 
the  more  faithful  to  their  scruples. 


138 


ANCESTRAL  VOICES 


But,  I  repeat,  I  do  not  believe  that  in  our  day 
men  are  not  worrying  about  their  sins.  If  the 
literature  of  our  time  is  in  any  faithful  way  the 
mirror  of  men's  souls,  the  one  preoccupation  and 
concern  to-day  is  just  the  ancient  moral  concern. 

It  is  true  that  one  may  have  to  listen  carefully, 
and  to  see  the  immediate  aspect  of  things  in  the 
light  of  history,  to  perceive  in  the  moral  anarchy 
of  our  time  anything  with  a  high  significance. 
Besides,  there  are  times  in  which  a  mood  of  revolt 
descends  upon  a  people  and  acquires  such  a  head 
and  volume  that  no  good  comes  of  mere  argu- 
ment. You  might  in  literal  truth  as  profitably 
argue  with  a  bull  which  has  begun  to  charge. 
We  must  wait  and  see,  in  the  sense  that  we  must 
simply  wait  until  other  people  see  what  we  for 
ourselves  saw  all  the  time. 

The  last  generation  has  witnessed  what  seems 
to  us  an  unusually  strong  and  thoroughgoing 
criticism  of  the  traditional  morality.  The  nature 
of  the  soul  has  been  put  to  the  test.  Experi- 
ments in  living  have  been  urged  and  followed 
which  disputed  the  rulings  and  findings  of  the 
former  time.  We  have  been  invited  in  the  name 
of  liberty  and  proper  manhood  to  set  out,  to 
discover  for  ourselves  the  nature  of  this  world 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     139 

and  our  own  nature.  To  find  out  whether  there 
is  a  limit  in  the  nature  of  things,  or,  as  we  should 
say,  in  God,  to  the  self-seeking  and  ruthless- 
ness  of  the  individual.  But  already,  as  I  verily 
believe,  signs  are  beginning  to  appear  of  the 
return  upon  the  soul  of  those  ancient  misgivings 
which  may  one  day  fling  men,  even  in  a  kind  of 
panic,  upon  the  breast  of  the  ancient  faith. 

For  the  fact  is,  we  men  and  women  who  are 
living  in  these  days  were  in  a  sense  not  born  in 
these  days.  The  blood  of  our  race  is  in  us.  The 
blood  of  humanity  is  in  us.  The  reminiscence 
is  there  in  our  blood  like  a  shadow,  the  remin- 
iscence of  great  perils  just  escaped,  of  great 
disasters  from  which  only  with  pain  and  the  beat- 
ing of  the  breast  we  have  arisen.  It  was  never 
for  a  moment  to  be  believed  that  the  race  of  man 
had  learned  nothing  through  all  its  long  travail ; 
or  that  its  wisdom,  embodied  in  its  laws  and 
in  its  pieties,  had  no  objective  and  reasonable 
reality.  Therefore  it  is  not  to  be  wondered  at 
that,  when  any  experiment  in  living  which 
repudiates  that  hard-won  wisdom  of  the  race 
has  gone  a  certain  length,  something  should  re- 
awaken in  the  human  soul  which  protests  that  it 
shall  go  no  further,  for  at  the  point  at  which  it 


I40  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

has  arrived  it  seems  to  be  reminded  by  dim 
intangible  portents  that  once  before  it  occupied 
that  perilous  ground  and  came  within  sight  of 
some  huge  terror. 

In  his  great  literature  the  soul  of  man  has 
gone  out  all  alone  to  face,  without  the  distractions 
which  we  average  men  allow  to  obscure  our 
vision,  the  limits  and  barriers  of  the  moral  world. 
Certain  elect  and  predestined  men  have  stood 
upon  lonely  promontories  of  the  Spirit  looking 
across  sad  waters.  They  have  seen  what  they 
have  seen  and  they  have  reported  it  to  us.  And 
so  far  as  their  soul  has  been  truly  human,  and  so 
far  as  they  have  kept  their  eyes  upon  the  facts 
and  have  not  spared  themselves,  they  have  with 
varying  degrees  of  clearness  and  authority  cor- 
roborated the  testimony  of  Him  who,  in  full 
self-consciousness,  tasted  death  and  touched  the 
bottom  and  leist  limit  of  human  experience  and 
personality. 

These  elect  and  priestly  souls,  who  have 
spoken  in  great  literature,  have  assured  us  that 
the  deepest  and  last  thing  about  man  is,  that 
there  is  a  way  by  which  he  must  go,  that  he 
bears  to  a  Holy  God  a  relation  which  cannot  be 
dissolved. 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     141 

I.  "The  Rime  of  the  Ancient  Mariner" 

If  my  purpose  were  purely  literary,  I  should 
occupy  myself  with  quotations  and  recollections 
from  the  wonders  of  The  Rime  of  the  Ancient 
Mariner.  My  object  rather  is  to  allow  the  poem 
to  speak  for  itself,  to  make  its  own  proper  im- 
pression upon  our  moral  nature.  I  believe  it  is 
by  some  such  form  of  words  as  that,  that  we  may 
maintain  the  balance  in  the  controversy  between 
art  and  morals.  It  is  probably  true,  on  the  whole, 
that  art  must  not  have  a  conscious  moral  motive. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  human  soul  is  so  subtle 
and  swift-glancing  that  you  must  not  put  a  limit 
to  its  resources.  It  would  be  easy  to  accept  the 
saying,  "art  for  art's  sake,"  if  it  were  not  so 
manifest  that  every  supreme  work  of  art — in 
sculpture,  in  painting,  in  music,  in  literature — has 
an  effect  upon  us  in  addition  to  its  effect  of 
beauty.  We  understand  and  can  sympathise 
with  the  feelings  of  impatience  and  proper  pride 
which  led  to  the  protest  underlying  the  phrase, 
"art  for  art's  sake."  It  must  have  seemed  to 
sincere  and  eager  spirits  a  sordid  thing  to  see  art 
hiring  herself  out  to  the  support  of  conventional 
views  of  life,  thereby  depressing  her  own  vitality 


142  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

because  thereby  allowing  the  world  of  interests 
to  divert  and  make  oblique  what  should  have 
been  her  steadfast  gaze.  And  so  at  the  rallying 
cry  of  this  phrase  there  was  a  movement  on  the 
other  side  which,  because  it  was  a  movement  and 
self-conscious,  was  sure  to  do  equal  violence  to 
the  truth  of  things.  Men  of  fine  sensibility, 
jealous  for  the  independence  and  freedom  of  art, 
made  their  protest  against  the  relation  which  they 
found  existing  in  their  day  between  art  and 
morals.  But  in  most  cases  the  way  they  took 
to  make  their  protest  was  by  devoting  their  art 
to  the  other  side  of  the  moral  issue.  This,  of 
course,  was  really  to  be  guilty  of  the  very  offence 
from  which  in  their  view  art  needed  to  be  purged. 
The  only  difference  was  that,  from  being  the 
servant  of  moral  convention,  art  became  the 
servant  of  want  of  convention.  Now,  as  St.  Paul 
once  said,  "circumcision  availeth  nothing";  but 
he  added,  "neither  doth  uncircumcision." 

It  is  an  old  controversy :  and  yet  the  truth  of 
the  matter  is  perhaps  simple  enough.  Art  should 
be  sincere.  Or  better  still,  artists  should  be  sincere 
men.  If  we  must  not  look  to  them  to  support 
conventional  morality,  we  ought  to  look  to  them 
not  to  support  what  Carlyle  used  to  call  Bedlam, 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     143 

either  for  the  fun  of  the  thing,  or  still  less  for  the 
money  there  may  be  in  the  business. 

A  great  man  who  is  expressing  himself  in  a 
picture  or  in  a  poem,  or,  if  I  may  say  so,  in 
a  sermon,  is  not  thinking  of  anything  except  how 
he  shall  not  pervert  or  qualify  the  flood  of  truth 
which  somehow  has  been  let  loose  within  him. 
The  moment  he  becomes  self-conscious,  the 
moment  he  permits  other  considerations  even  to 
whisper  to  him,  in  that  moment  he  has,  obscurely 
it  may  be,  but  quite  patently  in  the  judgment  of 
his  peers,  cut  himself  off  from  the  source  and 
home  of  all  truth  and  beauty  and  power. 

That  is  what  I  meant  when  I  said  some  time 
ago  that  all  truly  great  literature  is  confessional. 
It  is  that  quality  in  great  literature — that  it  is 
confessional — and  not  that  it  supports  or  impugns 
the  moral  code  of  our  time,  which  gives  great 
literature  an  influence  in  the  region  of  the  Will. 
It  is  not  that  the  writer,  the  poet,  or  the  dramatist, 
or  the  teller  of  a  tale,  sets  out  with  the  object  of 
influencing  us  in  any  way.  What  happens  is, 
that  the  poet,  or  the  dramatist,  or  the  teller  of  the 
tale,  has  himself  been  so  moved,  so  unified  in  the 
depths  of  his  life,  by  the  intensity  and  logic  of  his 
own  imagination,  that  his  words  reach  down  in  us 


144  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

to  that  precise  depth  from  which  they  proceeded 
in  him.  And  so  great  literature — and  the  same 
is  true  of  every  medium  of  spiritual  expression — 
great  literature  cannot  but  have  a  moral  influence 
upon  us ;  for  it  has  borne  witness  to  the  depth 
and  spirituality  of  our  human  nature.  When  we 
read  or  witness  a  great  tragedy,  it  may  very  well 
be  that  no  single  moral  scruple  in  our  soul  has 
been  fortified,  but  our  whole  soul  has  been  re- 
newed, purified  by  pity  or  by  terror.  We  close 
the  book,  or  we  come  out  into  the  night, 
with  something  of  that  double  assurance,  whose 
presence  indeed  makes  us  truly  human  :  we  are 
sure  of  our  own  soul,  and  if  we  are  not  sure 
of  God,  we  are  sure  at  least  that  it  is  a  very 
serious  thing  to  live,  that  we  live  in  a  world  of 
relationships. 

Now,  instead  of  working  my  way  through 
these  things,  I  might  have  been  employed  more 
wisely  in  expounding  the  wonderful  poem  which 
gives  indeed  such  pointed  illustration  of  what  I 
have  been  saying. 

You  will  read  in  any  text-book  that  Coleridge 
and  Wordsworth  inaugurated  the  Romantic  move- 
ment in  English  literature.  You  may  learn  there 
further  that   The  Rime  of  the  Ancient  Mariner 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     145 

or  something  that  was  to  be  like  it,  was  deliber- 
ately planned  by  those  two  great  poets.  As 
things  turned  out,  the  poem  came  to  be  written 
entirely  by  Coleridge,  though  Wordsworth  sup- 
plied a  fine  couplet  and  suggested  the  Albatross. 
But  when  you  have  learned  these  odds  and  ends, 
you  have  learned  nothing  of  real  consequence. 
It  is  practically  true,  for  example,  of  Coleridge 
and  Wordsworth  that,  in  the  words  of  the 
Ancient  Mariner  himself,  "they  were  the  first 
that  ever  burst  into  that  silent  sea."  But  why 
did  they  set  out?  Why  did  they  break  away 
from  the  recognised  materials  and  methods  of  the 
eighteenth  century  ?  Why,  when  they  felt  com- 
pelled to  set  out,  did  they  take  the  line  they 
took  ?  Why,  confining  ourselves  to  Coleridge 
and  to  this  poem,  could  he  not  escape,  he  who 
was  so  apt  to  refuse  a  task  which  was  likely  to 
make  a  demand  upon  him — why  could  he  not 
escape  such  a  subject  as  this  ?  And  how  did  it 
come  to  pass  that,  once  launched  upon  this  poem, 
his  soul  seems  to  us  to  be  under  a  doom  to 
penetrate  to  all  the  subtleties  and  horrors  of  such 
a  thing  of  the  spirit  ?  The  simple  fact  is,  and  we 
only  deceive  ourselves  if  we  try  to  get  behind  it, 

about  every  great  work  of  art — that  is  to  say,  of 
10 


146  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

self-expression — there  is  something  mysterious, 
inexplicable,  fated,  "and  he  who  can  explain  it 
least  is  he  by  whose  hand  it  was  done." 

"A  creative  work  stands  apart  and  remains 
mute  when  we  question  its  ancestry."  "It  is  a 
very  suggestive  fact  that  Goethe  could  never 
explain  many  things  in  Faust.  The  origin  of 
the  work  itself  was  as  mysterious  to  him  as  to 
everyone  else.  It  is  easy  enough  to  indicate  the 
sources  of  the  legend  and  of  many  of  the  incidents 
woven  into  it ;  but  what  affinity  lodged  this  seed 
in  the  soil  of  his  nature,  what  were  the  stages  by 
which  it  sank  deep  into  his  soul  and  became  so 
thoroughly  part  of  himself  that  it  came  forth  from 
his  brain  not  only  re-fashioned,  amplified,  harmon- 
ised with  itself  in  artistic  consistency,  but  pervaded 
by  a  soul  which  made  it  significant  of  profound 
and  universal  truth  ?  .  .  .  '  They  come  and  ask,' 
writes  Goethe,  *  what  idea  I  meant  to  embody  in 
my  Faust,  as  if  I  knew  myself.' 

•'  For  more  than  sixty  years  the  drama  was  on 
his  mind  ;  and  yet  he  tells  us  that  the  whole  poem 
rose  before  him  at  once  when  it  first  touched  his 
imagination.  He  often  spoke  of  the  progress  of 
the  work :  there  are  indeed  few  works  of  art 
concerning  the  shaping  and   evolution  of  which 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     147 

we  possess  such  full  and  trustworthy  information ; 
and  yet  of  the  first  contract  between  the  idea  and 
his  own  soul,  all  he  can  tell  us  is  that  it  was  sud- 
denly and  completely  disclosed  to  his  imagination  " 
(Mabie,  Essays  on  Literary  Interpretation). 

In  all  this,  great  literature  approaches  to  the 
passivity  of  nature.  It  offers  to  us  levels  and 
depths  of  interpretation  equal  to  the  level  and 
depth  of  our  own  soul.  You  may  take  the  poem 
as  a  temporary  tract  against  cruelty  to  animals ; 
and  even  from  that  point  of  view  it  will  always 
deserve  attention.  But,  if  you  are  so  minded,  if 
life  has  laid  your  soul  open  to  such  a  world  of 
ideas,  the  poem  may  be  to  you  and  will  be  to  you 
another  of  those  utter  and  unflinching  portrayals 
of  what  happens  when  a  man  has  done  something 
wrong,  irreparable,  and  when  the  wrong  he  has 
done  comes  back  upon  him,  so  that  he  sees 
nothing  else  in  all  the  world  except  that  wrong 
thing.  Of  course,  you  may  say,  "  But  no  man 
should  take  his  sins  so  seriously  as  the  Ancient 
Mariner  took  his  shooting  of  the  Albatross." 
And  you  and  I  may  decide  for  ourselves  that  we 
shall  not  take  ours  so  seriously.  Still,  as  the 
Psalmist  said,  "we  are  fearfully  and  wonderfully 
made,   and   that   my   soul   knoweth   right  well." 


148  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

We  never  know  in  what  mysterious  ways  some 
little  thing  which  we  have  been  able  to  make 
light  of,  and  almost  forget,  is  going  to  start  up 
like  an  armed  man,  and  stand  before  us  blocking 
our  way,  until  we  trample  it  down  and  deliberately 
choose  hell,  or  allow  its  accusation  to  compel  us 
to  our  knees,  where  we  must  remain  until  we  find, 
each  one  for  himself,  some  reason  for  rising,  in 
God  and  in  a  new  depth  and  softness  of  our  soul. 

Emerson  has  a  noble  passage  where,  illustrating 
the  indomitable  perseverance  of  man,  he  describes 
a  race  who  build  and  rebuild  their  homes  on  the 
slopes  of  a  volcano.  In  the  great  poems  of  the 
soul,  we  may  all  learn  on  the  surface  of  what 
unquiet  moral  elements  we  take  our  liberties. 

I  have  been  reading  recently  a  volume  entitled 
The  Eighteen  Nineties,  a  book  which  describes 
with  sympathy  and  justice  the  wonderful  outburst 
of  youth  in  literature  some  twenty  years  ago.  I 
am  not  speaking  of  the  excellence  of  the  work 
done  by  the  men  of  that  movement ;  and  I  am 
not  doubting  but  that  in  the  long-run  the  change 
of  air  may  prove  to  have  been  good  even  for  our 
spiritual  life ;  but  as  an  experiment  in  living  it 
was  a  movement  which  failed  and  will  fail. 

It  was  all  true  enough  for  those  who  said  the 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     149 

things  which  they  said  at  the  stage  at  which  they 
were  when  they  said  them.  But  it  was  no  way 
of  life  for  people  who  were  going  to  get  old,  or 
were  to  have  little  children,  or  having  little 
children  were  to  lose  them.  They  wrote  and 
advocated  views,  those  young  men,  as  though 
they  had  it  in  their  own  power  to  control  the 
subtle  and  inevitable  reactions  of  the  soul  within 
them.  They  did  not  lay  their  account  with  that 
traditional  life — the  sum,  within  the  breast  of 
every  man,  of  all  that  the  soul  has  seen  and  been 
— that  traditional  life  which,  like  the  turbulent 
element  beneath  volcanoes,  was  bearing  them  all 
the  time  that  they  were  making  their  futile  and 
provincial  proposals.  And  yet  already  in  that 
book  the  ground  has  begun  to  rock,  and  here  and 
there  the  old  terror  has  burst  from  the  ancient 
depth  of  things,  and  men  are  on  their  knees  who 
in  the  headlong  days  of  their  youth  had  despised 
themselves  for  having  knees. 

"  I've  taken  my  fun  where  I've  found  it, 
And  now  I  must  pay  for  my  fun." 

"And  the  end  of  it's  settin'  and  thinkin'." 
There  was  one  of  them — he  has  left  behind  him 
a  mass  of  strange  drawings  like  the  work  of 
Blake.     He  died  at  twenty-six.     In  his  last  days 


ISO  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

he  became  a  Christian.  Aye,  there's  the  rub ! 
It  is  all  very  well  if  a  man  is  never  to  know 
better.  But  if  one  day  he  comes  to  know  better, 
why  then  a  moral  upheaval  is  as  certain  as  the 
thing  which  happens  when  a  mine  is  fired. 
Indeed  that  is  the  very  formula  for  the  coming  of 
truth  to  a  man  or  to  an  age  :  it  is  the  firing  of 
a  mine.  In  his  last  days,  this  young  man  became 
a  Christian,  and  was  received  into  the  Church. 
Whereupon  a  terror  took  hold  on  him.  Oh, 
unreasonable  if  you  will,  exaggerated,  something 
that  took  advantage  of  his  bodily  weakness ! 
Yes,  that  may  all  be  true.  But  it  was  everything 
to  him  who  endured  it.  Out  there  in  the  last 
lucidity  of  his  soul  it  was  the  one  thing.  "  I 
implore  you,"  he  wrote,  "  I  implore  you  to  destroy 
all  copies  of  (naming  a  work  of  his)  and  all  like 
drawings  that  are  harmful.  Show  this  to  (naming 
a  friend),  and  conjure  him  to  do  the  same.  By 
all  that  is  holy,  all  obscene  drawings."  Then  he 
signed  his  name,  adding  the  words,  "In  my 
death  agony." 

We  none  of  us  know  how  we  are  going  to 
behave,  what  terrible  misgivings  are  one  day 
going  to  be  let  loose  by  some  event.  We  know 
within   limits   what  we  are,   surrounded   by   the 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     151 

interests,  the  faces,  the  habits  which  go  some  way 
towards  the  making  up  of  our  life.  But  we  all 
know  likewise  that  there  is  something  wild  and 
unpredicable  within  us.  Concerning  this  thing  it 
is  a  great  part  of  my  own  personal  religion  that  in 
every  set  of  circumstances  into  which  I  may 
plunge  or  drift  in  this  world  or  in  any  world, 
Christ,  whom  I  invoke  daily,  may  take  hold  of 
that  interior  life  of  mine  and  maintain  for  me  my 
personal  identity  and  chosen  spiritual  order.  For 
no  man  can  say  how  he  will  behave,  were  life  to 
drive  him  into  that  lonely  sea  through  which  the 
Ancient  Mariner  voyaged.  No  one  knows  what 
visions  will  yet  assail  him,  and  what  moral  terrors, 
based  it  may  be  upon  tiny  scruples  like  inverted 
pyramids  (what  terrors),  may  one  day  shake  his 
soul. 

Here  is  the  story  as  Coleridge  himself  repeated 
it  on  the  margin  of  the  poem. 

PART    I. 

An  ancient  Mariner  meeteth  three  Gallants 
bidden  to  a  wedding-feast,  and  detaineth  one. 

The  Wedding-Guest  is  spellbound  by  the  eye 
of  the  old  seafaring  man,  and  constrained  to  hear 
his  tale. 


152  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

The  Mariner  tells  how  the  ship  sailed  south- 
ward with  a  good  wind  and  fair  weather,  till  it 
reached  the  Line. 

The  Wedding- Guest  heareth  the  bridal  music  ; 
but  the  Mariner  continueth  his  tale. 

The  ship  driven  by  a  storm  toward  the  south 
pole. 

The  land  of  ice  and  of  fearful  sounds  where  no 
living  thing  was  to  be  seen.  Till  a  great  sea-bird, 
called  the  Albatross,  came  through  the  snow-fog, 
and  was  received  with  great  joy  and  hospitality. 

And  lo !  the  Albatross  proveth  a  bird  of  good 
omen,  and  followeth  the  ship  as  it  returned 
northward  through  fog  and  floating  ice. 

The  Ancient  Mariner  inhospitably  killeth  the 
pious  bird  of  good  omen. 

PART    II. 

His  shipmates  cry  out  against  the  Ancient 
Mariner  for  killing  the  bird  of  good  luck. 

But  when  the  fog  cleared  off,  they  justify  the 
same,  and  thus  make  themselves  accomplices  in 
the  crime. 

The  fair  breeze  continues ;  the  ship  enters  the 
Pacific  Ocean,  and  sails  northward,  even  till  it 
reaches  the  Line. 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     153 

The  ship  hath  been  suddenly  becalmed. 

And  the  Albatross  begins  to  be  avenged. 

A  Spirit  had  followed  them ;  one  of  the  in- 
visible inhabitants  of  this  planet,  neither  departed 
souls  nor  angels ;  concerning  whom  the  learned 
Jew  Josephus,  and  the  Platonic  Constantinopolitan 
Michael  Psellus,  may  be  consulted.  They  are  very 
numerous,  and  there  is  no  climate  or  element  with- 
out one  or  more. 

The  shipmates,  in  their  sore  distress,  would  fain 
throw  the  whole  guilt  on  the  Ancient  Mariner : 

In  sign  whereof  they  hang  the  dead  sea-bird 
round  his  neck. 

PART   III. 

The  Ancient  Mariner  beholdeth  a  sign  in  the 
element  afar  off. 

At  its  nearer  approach  it  seemeth  him  to  be 
a  ship ;  and  at  a  dear  ransom  he  freeth  his 
speech  from  the  bonds  of  thirst. 

A  flash  of  joy. 

And  horror  follows.  For  can  it  be  a  ship  that 
comes  onward  without  wind  or  tide  ? 

It  seemeth  him  but  the  skeleton  of  a  ship. 

And  its  ribs  are  seen  as  bars  on  the  face  of  the 
setting  Sun. 


154  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

The  Spectre- Woman  and  her  Death-mate,  and 
no  other  on  board  the  skeleton-ship. 

Like  vessel,  like  crew  I 

Death  and  Life-in-Death  have  diced  for  the 
ship's  crew,  and  she  (the  latter)  winneth  the 
Ancient  Mariner. 

No  twilight  within  the  courts  of  the  Sun. 

At  the  rising  of  the  Moon, 

One  after  another. 

His  shipmates  drop  down  dead. 

But  Life-in-Death  begins  her  work  on  the 
Ancient  Mariner. 

PART    IV. 

The  Wedding-Guest  feareth  that  a  Spirit  is 
talking  to  him ; 

But  the  Ancient  Mariner  assureth  him  of  his 
bodily  life,  and  proceedeth  to  relate  his  horrible 
penance. 

He  despiseth  the  creatures  of  the  calm. 

And  envieth  that  they  should  live,  and  so 
many  lie  dead. 

But  the  curse  liveth  for  him  in  the  eye  of  the 
dead  men. 

In  his  loneliness  and  fixedness  he  yearneth 
towards  the  journeying  Moon,  and  the  stars  that 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     155 

still  sojourn,  yet  still  move  onward ;  and  every- 
where the  blue  sky  belongs  to  them,  and  is  their 
appointed  rest,  and  their  native  country  and  their 
own  natural  homes,  which  they  enter  unannounced, 
as  lords  that  are  certainly  expected  and  yet  there 
is  a  silent  joy  at  their  arrival. 

By  the  light  of  the  Moon  he  beholdeth  God's 
creatures  of  the  great  calm. 

Their  beauty  and  their  happiness. 

He  blesseth  them  in  his  heart. 

The  spell  begins  to  break. 

PART    V. 

By  grace  of  the  holy  Mother,  the  Ancient 
Mariner  is  refreshed  with  rain. 

He  heareth  sounds  and  seeth  strange  sights 
and  commotions  in  the  sky  and  the  element. 

The  bodies  of  the  ship's  crew  are  inspired,  and 
the  ship  moves  on  ; 

But  not  by  the  souls  of  the  men,  nor  by 
demons  of  earth  or  middle  air,  but  by  a  blessed 
troop  of  angelic  spirits,  sent  down  by  the  invoca- 
tion of  the  guardian  saint. 

The  lonesome  Spirit  from  the  south  pole 
carries  on  the  ship  as  far  as  the  Line,  in  obedience 
to  the  angelic  troop,  but  still  requireth  vengeance. 


156  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

The  Polar  Spirit's  fellow-daemons,  the  invisible 
inhabitants  of  the  element,  take  part  in  his  wrong  ; 
and  two  of  them  relate  one  to  another  that 
penance  long  and  heavy  for  the  Ancient  Mariner 
hath  been  accorded  to  the  Polar  Spirit,  who 
returneth  southward. 

PART   VI. 

The  Mariner  hath  been  cast  into  a  trance ;  for 
the  angelic  power  causeth  the  vessel  to  drive 
northward  faster  than  human  life  could  endure. 

The  supernatural  motion  is  retarded;  the 
Mariner  awakes,  and  his  penance  begins  anew. 

The  curse  is  finally  expiated. 

And  the  Ancient  Mariner  beholdeth  his  native 
country. 

The  angelic  spirits  leave  the  dead  bodies, 

And  appear  in  their  own  forms  of  light. 

PART   VII. 

The  Hermit  of  the  Wood 
Approacheth  the  ship  with  wonder. 
The  ship  suddenly  sinketh. 
The  Ancient  Mariner  is  saved  in  the  Pilot's 
boat. 

The  Ancient  Mariner  earnestly  entreateth  the 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     157 

Hermit  to  shrieve  him ;  and  the  penance  of  life 
falls  on  him. 

And  ever  and  anon  throughout  his  future  life 
an  agony  constraineth  him  to  travel  from  land  to 
land. 

And  to  teach,  by  his  own  example,  love  and 
reverence  to  things  that  God  made  and  loveth. 

That  is  the  story.  The  moral  authority  of  it 
lies  just  here,  that  we  cannot  read  it  or  hear  it 
read  without  the  sense  that  in  some  region,  remote 
indeed  from  our  accustomed  interests  but  close  to 
us  and  of  the  deepest  consequence,  it  is  all  true, 
nay  that  it  is  all  the  truth.  There  is  a  sense  in 
which  it  IS  what  it  is  to  us.  If  there  is  anyone 
to  whom  it  all  means  nothing,  then  in  that  one's 
case  nothing  more  is  to  be  said.  That  he  feels 
nothing  when  other  people  feel  something,  is  his 
own  personal  problem. 

For  there  are  those  for  whom  the  story  does 
mean  something  on  the  moral  plane,  and  indeed 
means  nothing  else,  and  must  be  permitted  to 
mean  nothing  further  until  the  moral  demand  of 
it  is  confessed.  Well,  there  it  is.  The  soul  of 
a  man  once  saw  all  that.  And  he  has  enabled 
us  to  see  it.     Out  upon  that  lonely,  inalienable 


158  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

life  of  our  own  we  have  seen  his  signal  and  have 
signalled  back  to  him. 

We  have  heard  a  story.  And  this  is  the 
immense  responsibility  of  seeing  truth :  it  is  left 
to  us  one  by  one,  who  have  heard  such  a  story, 
to  act  and  take  up  our  life  henceforward  as  people 
must- who  by  the  illumination  of  such  a  story  have 
now  become  aware  of  certain  things  ;  as  people 
for  whom  it  means  what  it  means. 


II.   "Peer  Gynt" 

It  is  the  customary  thing  to  say  that  Ibsen  in 
Peer  Gynt  set  himself  to  hold  up  the  mirror  to  the 
moral  countenance  of  his  native  Norway.  Here, 
however,  as  elsewhere,  the  insight  of  genius, 
like  the  word  of  God,  is  never  of  merely  private 
interpretation.  Peer  Gynt  is  not  simply  a  Nor- 
wegian of  our  time ;  he  is  a  man  of  all  time. 
The  poet  has  grasped  the  principle  of  his  life  so 
deeply,  has  with  such  fairness  and  inevitable- 
ness  pursued  what  may  have  seemed  to  Peer 
Gynt  himself  to  be  casual  and  irrelevant  words, 
imaginations,  actions,  to  their  one  source  in  his 
ultimate  nature,  that  in  writing  the  play  Peer 
Gynt  Ibsen  has  declared  from  the  housetops  the 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     159 

secret  of  many  hearts.  For,  once  again,  we  men 
and  women  have  come  a  long  way,  and  have  in 
the  course  of  our  voyage  seen  many  things  by 
land  and  sea.  We  have  trafficked  in  strange 
merchandise.  The  reminiscences  of  infinitely 
various  experiences  lurk  within  us,  written,  as  it 
were,  on  the  tablets  of  our  heart,  in  invisible  ink. 
And  at  the  challenge  of  a  deep-seeing  report 
concerning  any  one  human  soul,  the  hidden 
characters  in  every  human  heart  stand  out. 

I  am  quite  sure  that  if  Peer  Gynt  had  a  fair 
chance,  it  would  do  an  enormous  moral  service. 
In  spite  of  its  apparent  richness  and  complexity, 
it  is  a  simple  drama.  The  very  opening  words, 
"  Peer,  you're  lying ! "  put  the  clue  into  our 
hands  at  the  outset.  All  that  follows  is  the 
movement  towards  that  particular  moral  crisis 
(and  to  the  solution  of  it,  if  there  is  in  the  drama 
such  a  solution)  in  which  an  essentially  shifty  and 
plausible  human  soul  is  at  last  confronted  with 
the  truth  about  itself. 

It  is  a  work  also  which  should  appeal  to  men 
of  what  is  called  a  practical  turn  of  mind,  who 
may  not  take  seriously  the  moral  challenge  of 
such  poetry  as  deals  with  the  troubles  and  em- 
barrassments of  rarer  souls.      I   can  overhear  a 


l6o  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

man  saying,  "  Hamlet !  'to  be  or  not  to  be ! ' 
What  moonshine  !  The  man  had  far  too  little 
to  do !  These  dreamers  and  poets  only  put 
ideas  into  people's  heads."  Now  Peer  Gynt  is  a 
practical  man  in  the  sense  that  he  is  one  of  those 
men  who,  having  set  his  heart  upon  something, 
tries  to  get  it.  If  scruples  arise  in  his  mind  as  to 
whether  or  not  what  he  is  doing  or  has  done  is 
right,  he  has  an  inexhaustible  faculty  for  dodging 
the  moral  point  and  slurring  it  over  with  that 
rhetoric  of  self-support  and  self-justification  for 
which  we  all  have  a  perilous  facility.  Of  course, 
he  has  his  deeper  moments  as  we  all  have,  even 
the  most  prosaic,  when  we  suspect  that  the  kind 
of  thing  which  we  try  to  make  light  of  as  poetry, 
as  imagination,  as  dreaming,  may  after  all  be 
the  truth  and  the  thing  with  which  we  have 
to  do. 

I  once  walked  over  the  island  of  Rousay  in 
the  Orkney  group.  It  stands  sheer  out  of  the 
sea  like  a  table,  a  green  and  pleasant  island. 
The  sun  was  shining  in  a  cloudless  sky  that  day ; 
and  yet  it  would  have  been  disastrous  to  keep 
one's  eyes  too  much  above  the  earth.  For  again 
and  again  one  came  to  a  narrow  slit  or  crack 
where,  looking  down,  one  saw  the  sea  wriggling 


J 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     i6i 

like  a  snake  some  hundreds  of  feet  beneath.  In 
his  successful  and  outrageous  career  Peer  Gynt 
comes  to  such  slits  and  cracks  in  his  own  chosen 
scheme  of  things.  Of  course  he  does  things 
which  we  who  dwell  in  cities  cannot  do.  But 
these  are  not  of  the  essence  of  his  moral 
history.  The  essence  of  his  moral  history  is 
something  which  we  have  in  common  with  him, 
something  certainly  which  offers  itself  to  us  all. 
No  one  knows  better  than  Peer  Gynt  himself 
what  precisely  is  that  fundamental  fault.  He 
did  not  regard  it  as  a  fault :  he  simply  regarded 
it  as  a  fact.  Sometimes  he  boasted  of  it.  Some- 
times he  simply  accepted  it  as  part  of  himself, 
as  he  accepted  the  mountains  as  part  of  the 
world.  There  were  moments  when  he  was 
ashamed  of  it.  And  at  the  last  he  cried  out 
in  terror  to  be  delivered  from  it. 

And  now  what  was  this  last  fact  or  bias  in 
Peer  Gynt's  soul  which,  and  not  circumstance, 
ordered  his  life  and,  to  say  no  more,  put  his 
eternal  destiny  in  hazard  ?  Well,  after  all,  no 
one  knows  us  so  well  as  we  know  ourselves. 
"  The  spirit  of  a  man  is  the  candle  of  the  Lord  "  : 
and  more  than  once  did  Peer  Gynt  himself  put 

his  finger  with  absolute  precision  upon  his  own 
II 


1 62  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

weak  spot.  For  example,  once  upon  a  time, 
when  he  was  in  hiding  in  the  forest,  after  one  of 
his  early  misdemeanours,  he  sees  a  boy  carrying 
a  scythe.  The  boy  looks  about  him  stealthily  to 
make  sure  that  he  is  not  observed,  and  then 
with  the  scythe  cuts  off  his  own  finger.  He 
wraps  up  his  bleeding  hand  and  disappears. 
Peer  Gynt  understands  everything.  It  is  a  boy 
who  in  fear  or  hatred  of  the  national  conscription 
has  maimed  himself  so  that  he  may  escape  as 
disqualified.  Pondering  the  incident,  Peer  sees 
with  perfect  clearness  that  it  is  just  a  thing  like 
that  that  he  could  never  bring  himself  to  do. 
Like  that  boy,  he  also  might  hate  conscription 
and  take  means  to  escape  it ;  but  it  never,  never 
would  be  such  means.  He  might  think  of  such 
means.  Yes,  he  probably  would :  for  it  was 
a  well-known,  much-used  way  of  avoiding  the 
military  service.  He  would  certainly  think  of 
it 

"Ay,  wish  it  done, — will  it  to  boot, — 
But  do  it  I — No,  that's  past  my  understanding." 

There  you  have  the  moral  formula  for  this  man : 
he  will  never  go  through  a  thing,  but  round  about 
it.  He  will  never  stand  up  to  the  consequences 
of  his  own  acts.     He  will  not  act  unless  he  has 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     163 

already  conceived  the  consequences  and  dis- 
counted them,  not  by  the  energy  and  fidelity  of 
his  own  soul,  but  by  making  sure  of  a  back  door, 
a  line  of  retreat,  a  bridge.  Rather  than  look  into 
the  face  of  those  moral  realities  which  visit  him, 
he  will  fell  trees,  as  another  man  might  play  hard 
at  golf,  or  he  will  drink,  or  he  will  whip  up  his 
own  jaded  passions,  or  he  will  intoxicate  himself 
with  lies  of  his  own  imagining,  or  he  will  assume 
the  very  consolations  of  religion  as  though  they 
had  been  specially  intended  for  him.  Peer  Gynt 
will  not  go  straight.  He  will  not  think  straight : 
and  straight  thinking  is  a  formula  for  righteous- 
ness. Whenever  a  situation  is  becoming  too  hot 
for  him,  he  will  leave  it.  Whenever  his  own 
thoughts  are  becoming  too  sombre  and  close- 
fitting,  he  will  think  of  something  else.  He  will 
never  cut  off  his  finger — for  anything,  either  good 
or  bad.  He  will  not  endure  the  knife  of  reality 
even  for  the  sake  of  the  integrity  and  thorough- 
ness of  his  soul.  And  yet,  all  the  time,  except 
in  those  moments  when  he  sees  through  himself 
and  knows  that  with  all  his  tricks  he  is  merely 
postponing  a  painful  interview, — all  the  time  he 
takes  pride  in  this  mastery  of  himself,  as  he  calls 
it, — that  he  is  above  those  scruples  and  interior 


l64  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

judgments  which  stultify  weaker  men.  He  calls 
this  "being  himself,"  and  "being  emperor  of 
himself,"  when  the  fact  is,  he  is  all  the  time 
afraid  of  himself.  He  even  allows  himself  to 
believe  that  he  is  fighting  his  own  battle  and 
bearing  the  consequences  of  his  own  acts, 
whereas  the  fact  is,  his  whole  path  is  strewn  with 
sorrow,  which  falls,  not  upon  himself,  but  upon 
those  like  Ase  his  old  mother  and  Solvejg  his 
sweetheart,  who,  because  they  love  him,  must 
wait  and  suffer.  It  is  such  an  easy  thing  for  a 
man  to  say  that  he  can  surely  do  what  he  likes 
so  long  as  he  is  ready  to  bear  the  penalty. 
But  the  fact  is,  no  man  can  bear  more  than  a 
very  small  part  of  the  influence  which  follows 
inevitably  upon  his  acts. 

One  night,  later  on  in  the  story.  Peer  Gynt,  in 
the  height  of  his  prosperity,  is  discoursing  over 
the  wine.  He  is,  as  usual,  complimenting  himself 
upon  his  success.  He  attributes  it  all  to  his 
consistent  adherence  to  the  policy  of  "going 
round,"  of  hedging,  of  not  committing  oneself 
"once  for  all"  to  anything.  He  has  a  fine 
outburst  elsewhere  against  the  phrase  "once  for 
all,"  and  against  the  entire  idea  of  it.  Hold  on, 
he  would  say,  so  long  as  it  suits  you ;  but  at  that 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     165 

point  let  go.  But  hearken  to  Peer  Gynt :  like 
some  of  the  world's  most  sinister  figures,  he  has 
style. 

"The  key  to  the  art 
Of  life's  affairs  is  simply  this : 
To  keep  one's  ear  close  shut  against 
The  ingress  of  one  dangerous  viper." 

"  What  sort  of  viper,  pray,  dear  friend  ?  "  asks 
Mr.  Cotton,  one  of  the  sycophants  who  is  listening 
to  him.     And  Peer  continues  : 

"A  little  one  that  slyly  wiles  you 
To  tempt  the  irretrievable. 
The  essence  of  the  art  of  daring, 
The  art  of  bravery  in  fact, 
Is  this  :  To  stand  with  choice-free  foot 
Amid  the  treacherous  snares  of  life, — 
To  know  for  sure  that  other  days 
Remain  beyond  the  day  of  battle, — 
To  know  that  ever  in  the  rear 
A  bridge  for  your  retreat  stands  open. 
This  theory  has  borne  me  on. 
Has  given  my  whole  career  its  colour." 

Peer  Gynt,  in  fact,  is  one  of  those  who  will  be 
morally  comfortable.  They  do  not  propose  to 
conform  to  the  rules  for  living  which  make  for 
peace  of  conscience.  But  if  conscience  should 
stir,  and  such  men  are  not  unaware  that  it  may, 
he  has  his  resource.  He  will  dodge  its  thrust. 
He  will  think  of  something  else.  He  will  make 
a  large  contribution  to  some  undoubtedly  good 


1 66 


ANCESTRAL  VOICES 


cause,  as  Peer  Gynt,    when  he  became  a  little 

uneasy  about  his  slave-carrying  business,  became 

a  large  exporter  of  Bibles  by  the  same  ships, — 

with  the  idea  that  God  will  be   sensible  and  is 

sure  to  put  one   thing  against  another.     It  was 

like  him,  for  instance,  when,  after  a  long  absence, 

during  which  his  old  mother  was  left  to  see  her 

home  dismantled  to  pay  his  fines,  herself  sinking 

to  death,  it  was  like  him,  on  entering   the   old 

home,  to  forestall  any  word  of  reproach  by  sitting 

on  the  edge  of  her  bed,  putting  his  big  arms 

round  her  frail  body,  knowing  (for  these  subtle 

rascals  know  everything)  that  the  divinity  of  a 

mother  is  just  this,  that  she  is  ready  to  take  any 

excuse  for  not  keeping  up  even  a  true  judgment 

of  her  child  if  that  judgment  is  hard.     There  he 

sat,  and  before  she  could  speak  he  had  begun  his 

old  romantic  stories  recalling  old  incidents,  mixing 

them  with  new  lies,  bearing  down  all  her  sense  of 

injury  : 

"  No,  now  we  will  chat  together, 
But  only  of  this  and  that, — 
Forget  what's  awry  and  crooked, 
And  all  that  is  sharp  and  sore." 

"  Forget  all  that  is  sharp  and  sore  " :  that  is  the 
formula  for  Peer  Gynt. 

And  now  for  this  piece  of  sincere  imagination, 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     167 

in  which  one  who  even  here  betrays  that  profound 
and  ruthless  power  of  analysis  to  which  he  gave 
free  rein  in  his  later  social  plays  depicts  the  career 
of  a  man  who  has  adopted  such  a  formula  for  life. 

Peer  Gynt's  first  handicap  was  his  father. 
From  that  father  he  inherited  a  swaggering  and 
disorderly  disposition.  The  father  had  been  a 
hard  drinker,  proud,  flamboyant,  unusual.  He 
came  of  a  family  of  some  standing,  and  that  fact 
alone  had  seemed  to  justify  his  indolence,  and  to 
establish  his  right  to  be  a  law  to  himself.  He 
was  what  Mr.  Chesterton  has  called  "a  rich  and 
reeking  human  personality."  As  was  natural,  his 
wife  Ase  had  a  hard  time.  Poverty  crept  upon 
the  home  like  a  frost.  Poverty,  says  Emerson, 
is  demoralising.  It  is  no  answer  to  Emerson  to 
say  that  it  need  not  be. 

Ase  took  refuge  from  the  brutality  of  her 
position  in  fairy-tales,  in  stories  of  heroes,  in 
folklore  and  mystery.  Peer  Gynt  was  the  child 
of  these  two,  according  to  the  spirit  also. 

For  myself,  I  think  that  in  this  drama  Ibsen  is 
fairer  to  all  the  facts  of  heredity  than  he  came  to 
be  in  his  later  writings.  In  those  later  writings 
he  lays  a  terrible  emphasis  upon  the  inheritance 
which  descends  from  generation   to  generation 


i68 


ANCESTRAL  VOICES 


But  he  came  almost  to  lose  sight  of  the  spirit  of 
protest  and  moral  freedom  which  likewise  is  an 
endowment  or  prejudice  of  every  human  life. 

In  Peer  Gynt  we  can  see  the  working  of  the 
drunken,  riotous  father,  and  of  the  dreamy, 
imaginative  mother :  but  in  Peer  Gynt  we  can 
see  also  the  working  of  another  personality  which 
knows  itself  and  which  might  have  taken 
measures. 

When  we  first  meet  Peer  Gynt,  he  is  in  the 
middle  of  one  of  his  stories  which  were  apt  to 
grow  more  and  more  wonderful  as  he  proceeded 
with  them ;  stories  which  he  told  with  such 
circumstance  and  eloquence  that  he  ended  either 
believing  them,  or  feeling  and  behaving  as  though 
they  were  true. 

He  is  sore  at  the  moment  because  in  a  quarrel 
he  has  had  the  worse  of  it,  and  with  that  thin- 
skinnedness  of  his  he  suspects  that  people  are 
laughing  at  him.  He  would  like  to  do  something 
to  sooth  his  vanity  and  to  re-establish  himself  as 
what  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett  has  called  "a  card." 

Ingrid,  who  would  appear  to  have  been  in  love 
with  him,  though  her  parents  were  opposed,  is  to 
be  married  to  a  kind  of  simpleton.  Peer  Gynt 
hangs    about,    hating    everybody.      The   young 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     169 

girls  will  not  dance  with  him.  Even  Solvejg, 
whom  Peer  has  the  insight  to  see  as  differing  from 
all  the  others  in  sweetness  and  modesty,  "  with 
her  eyes  on  the  ground  and  her  hand  on  her 
mother's  skirt,"  even  Solvejg  shrinks  from  this 
wild  man.  He  breaks  through  a  door,  finds 
Ingrid,  the  bride,  and  carries  her  off  to  the 
mountains  by  a  path  too  perilous  for  pursuers. 
This  is  done  not  in  love,  but  in  sheer  vanity  and 
rebelliousness  and  self-assertion.  An  action  like 
that,  of  course,  brings  things  to  a  crisis :  a  man 
must  repent  and  get  better,  or  go  on  and  get 
worse.  He  sends  Ingrid  home,  and  himself 
wanders  among  the  mountains.  Here  he 
encounters  mythical  beings,  trolls  and  the  Dovre 
King, — representing  without  doubt  the  collapse 
for  the  time  being  of  all  the  protesting  voices  in 
the  man's  soul.  For  the  trolls  are  those  beings 
in  this  world  who  are  affected  by  our  thoughts, 
and  whose  thoughts  affect  us  just  as  though 
thoughts  were  completed  actions. 

Nevertheless  the  higher  voice  is  not  quite 
silent  in  Peer ;  though  when  it  appeals  to  him, 
instead  of  acting  upon  it,  he  simply  becomes 
sentimental  over  it,  thus  allowing  it  to  evaporate 
without  having  touched  his  will. 


I70  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

"There  go  two  brown  eagles  sailing,  and 
southward  the  wild  geese  fly ;  and  here  in  the 
mire  knee-deep  must  I  tramp  and  moil.  (Leaps 
up.)  Yea,  I  will  with  them !  Yea,  I  will  wash 
myself  pure  in  the  bath  of  the  keenest  wind  !  I 
will  up ;  I  will  plunge  myself  clean  in  the  shining 
baptismal  font,  I  will  out  .  .  .  o'er  the  mountains, 
I  will  ride  all  sweet  in  soul." 

But  as  a  matter  of  fact  he  does  nothing.  He 
was  one  of  those  who  exhaust  the  impulses  of 
their  soul  in  mere  feeling  or  in  speech ;  who, 
instead  of  acting,  simply  approve  of  themselves 
for  having  had  such  feelings,  and  move  a  vote  of 
confidence  in  themselves.  If  there  is  any  motion 
to  the  contrary,  they  declare  it  to  be  out  of  order. 

Solvejg,  the  sweet  maiden,  who,  as  such  things 
in  the  wonderful  Providence  of  God  do  happen, 
sees  something  in  this  wild  man  which  has  let 
loose  her  power  to  love,  Solvejg  seeks  him  in  the 
mountains,  and  is  ready  to  share  her  life  with  him. 
He  is  man  enough  to  know  the  value  of  her, — 
"  it  makes  any  day  a  holy  day  to  look  at  you  "  ; — 
and  sensitive  enough  to  perceive  that  in  loyalty 
to  such  a  pure  woman  his  disintegrated  life  would 
become  sound  and  true.  But  he  is  man  enough 
also   to  know  that  Solvejg  is   not   one   to   love 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     171 

lightly,  but  to  love  once  for  all.  And  there,  of 
course,  he  fails.  She  has  entered  his  cottage, 
he  remaining  outside.  But  he  does  not  enter. 
Solvejg  speaks  :  "  Are  you  coming  ?  *'  "  Round 
about  I "  he  answers  to  himself.  "  What  ? " 
"You  must  wait.  It  is  dark,  and  I've  got  some- 
thing heavy  to  fetch."  "  Wait :  I  will  help  you  : 
the  burden  we'll  share."  "  No,  stay  where  you 
are  1  I  must  bear  it  alone."  "  But  don't  go  too 
far,  dear ! "  "Be  patient,  my  girl :  be  my  way 
short  or  long,  you  must  wait."  And  Solvejg 
answers,  nodding  to  him  as  he  goes,  "Yes,  I'll 
wait." 

But  he  does  not  come  back  :  at  least,  not  yet. 

He  visits  his  mother,  who  is  just  dying.  She 
is  too  weak  to  scold,  and,  as  we  saw,  he  soon, 
with  his  stories  and  his  fancies,  puts  her  off.  He 
makes  her  imagine  that  he  and  she  are  off  on 
a  sleigh.  He  snaps  his  fingers,  cracks  a  whip, 
until  the  old  woman  feels  the  wind  on  her  cheeks, 
and  sees  the  lights  of  the  city  towards  which  she 
is  being  borne.  But  it  is  the  city  of  God  :  for  as 
Peer  Gynt  looks  hard  at  her  he  sees  that  she  is 
dead.  A  great  gulp  of  tenderness  rises  in  his 
throat ;  but  once  again  he  destroys  the  very 
power  of  moral  grief  to  do  him  good.     He  takes 


172  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

credit  to  himself  for  such  fineness  of  feeling. 
He  kisses  his  mother,  saying,  *'  That  is  the 
driver's  fee,"  and  then  goes  out,  leaving  a  poor 
peasant  girl  to  bury  her ! 

Peer  Gynt  emigrates,  and  we  are  led  to  under- 
stand that  by  the  faithful  application  of  his  own 
unscrupulous  principles  he  makes  a  fortune. 
This,  in  course  of  time,  he  loses.  After  wander- 
ings in  Morocco  and  in  the  Sahara  he  at  length 
turns  his  face  homewards.  It  is  here  that  the 
drama  rises  to  the  level  of  great  writing,  to  that 
level  of  moral  insight  and  tenderness  which  will 
ensure  it  a  place  for  ever.  Peer  Gynt  comes 
back,  and  Ibsen  makes  us  feel  that  this  is  what 
we  have  all  to  do  :  we  have  to  come  back.  It  is 
not  easy.  "  Like  an  infinite  wail  is  this  coming 
in,  coming  home,  coming  back."  For  those  who 
have  eyes  to  see  it  is  the  first  streak  of  any 
possible  dawn  for  this  man  that  he  has  so  far 
overcome  his  love  of  moral  comfort  as  to  come 
back  to  scenes  which  must  have  the  power  to 
strike  at  his  soul. 

On  the  ship  which  is  bearing  him  to  Norway 
he  encounters,  when  they  are  about  a  day's 
sailing  from  port,  a  stranger  whom  he  had  not 
seen  previously.     Of  course  this  is  simply  Peer 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     173 

Gynt  himself.  It  is  the  poet's  way  of  telling  us 
that  after  the  mid-time  of  our  life  a  man  is  never 
alone ;  that  there  is  always  himself,  the  man  he 
has  been,  and  himself,  the  better  man  he  has 
not  been  and  might  have  been.  Out  at  sea,  and 
especially  when,  as  happened  to  Peer  Gynt's 
ship,  a  storm  has  broken  loose  and  spars  are 
going  by  the  board,  is  a  sure  time  and  place  for 
meeting  that  stranger  who  is  a  man's  own  self. 

The  ship  is  wrecked.  Peer  Gynt  and  the  cook 
hang  on  to  the  keel  of  an  upturned  boat.  But  it 
can  only  bear  one,  and  Peer  Gynt  takes  care  that 
he  is  the  one.  Seated  there,  the  mysterious 
stranger  joins  him  and  begins  to  talk  about 
things.  Peer  Gynt  reaches  land,  and  things 
begin  to  ferment  in  his  soul.  There  was  a  time 
when  he  was  more  or  less  master  of  his  own 
faculties,  a  time  when  he  could  use  his  subtilty 
to  extricate  him  out  of  difficult  places.  But,  as  I 
said  in  our  last  study,  we  never  know  how  we  are 
going  to  behave.  Those  very  faculties  now  turn 
upon  Peer  Gynt  and  employ  all  their  subtilty  to 
drive  him  out  of  his  own  corners,  to  expose  his 
own  sophistries  to  himself  and  to  leave  him  no 
hiding-place  from  reality.  He  begins  with  awful 
clarity  to  see  through  himself.     He  sees  that  he 


174  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

has  never  been  anything.  Thinking  himself 
master  of  himself,  he  has,  on  the  contrary,  been 
the  victim  of  this  and  that  and  everything.  He 
picks  up  an  onion  and  begins  to  peel  one  layer 
from  another,  always  discovering  still  another, 
and  that  the  whole  thing  is  a  thing  of  layers 
without  any  central  personality.  And  he  per- 
ceives that  that  is  a  picture  of  himself. 

"  What  an  enormous  number  of  swathings  1 
Isn't  the  kernel  soon  coming  to  light? 
I'm  blest  if  it  is  !  to  the  innermost  centre 
It's  nothing  but  swathings  each  smaller  and  smaller." 

He  tries  to  rally  the  old  Peer  Gynt  who  could 
sophisticate  his  own  feelings ;  but  in  vain.  He 
cannot  but  be  serious,  even  superstitious.  He 
sees  grey  thread-balls,  and  they  keep  saying  to 
him :  "  We  are  the  thoughts  thou  shouldst  have 
brought  us."  He  sees  withered  leaves,  which 
also  charge  him :  "  We  are  a  watchword :  thou 
shouldst  have  proclaimed  us."  The  winds  sigh, 
and  they  seem  to  say  :  "  We  are  the  songs  thou 
shouldst  have  sung."  "We  are  tears,"  say  the 
dewdrops,  "unshed  for  ever."  The  broken 
straws  on  which  he  treads  speak  up  to  him : 
"  We  are  deeds,  thou  shouldst  have  achieved  us : 
Doubt  hath  throttled,  hath  crippled  us."     And  at 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     175 

last  he  hears  the  wailing  of  his  old  mother's 
voice  :  *'  You've  driven  me  the  wrong  way,"  it 
complains. 

In  this  mood  he  encounters  a  strange  symboli- 
cal figure.  Ibsen  calls  him  the  Button-moulder. 
He  carries  with  him  a  ladle  in  which  are  placed 
for  melting  the  souls  of  people  who,  like  Dante's 
neutrals  (who  were  too  bad  for  Hell),  have  in  this 
world  been  nothing,  have  never  with  energy  been 
either  good  or  bad. 

There  is,  says  this  Button-moulder,  one  destiny 
for  those  whose  will  has  been  good  :  and  there  is 
another  destiny  for  those  whose  will  has  been 
bad ;  but  for  those  who  have  never  taken  up  a 
strong  stand  in  life,  either  good  or  bad,  who  have 
simply  been  for  themselves  at  every  moment, 
there  is  no  destiny  but  to  be  melted  down  into 
mere  material,  as  you  melt  down  a  defaced  coin. 
The  charge,  that  is  to  say,  which  Peer  Gynt's 
awakened  conscience  makes  against  him  is  that 
he  has  been — nothing  ! 

There  follows  a  time,  we  are  asked  to  imagine, 
when  Peer  Gynt  is  searching  for  something  either 
good  or  bad  which  he  can  bring  to  the  Button- 
moulder's  judgment,  claiming  that  there  and  then 
did  he,  Peer  Gynt,  assert  his  true  soul,  that  he 


176  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

may  claim  on  the  strength  of  that  one  thing  a 
man's  place  and  destiny.  But  his  own  ruthless 
and  subtle  mind,  which  formerly  served  him  well, 
is  now  against  him.  He  can  find  in  all  his  career 
no  individual,  personal  act,  no  act  which  with  all 
its  consequences  he  accepted  and  stood  by. 
Time  and  again  the  Button-moulder  crosses  his 
path,  reminding  him  that  the  hour  cannot  be 
much  longer  delayed. 

One  day  in  his  wanderings  he  hears  through 
the  mist  the  voice  of  one  singing.  Something 
awakens  within  him.  Following  the  direction  of 
the  sound,  he  reaches  a  hut,  and  coming  to  the 
doorway  he  sees  within,  Solvejg,  the  sweet  maiden 
who  loved  him,  now  old  and  blind.  Though  her 
eyes  are  without  vision,  she  knows  that  it  is  he, — 
he  for  whose  coming  she  has  waited  all  those 
years.  "It  is  he !  it  is  he !  Now  blessed  be 
God ! "  she  cries.  But  in  a  voice  hoarse  with 
concern  he  interrupts  her.  He  asks  her  for  the 
tale  of  his  heartlessness  towards  her,  so  that  he 
may  submit  even  that  to  his  judge.  But  she 
protests  that  he  has  never  wronged  her ;  that, 
on  the  contrary,  her  love  of  him  has  made  her 
life  the  great  thing  it  has  been. 

With  this,  his  last  hope  seems  lost,  when  it 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     177 

conies  suddenly  upon  him  that  perhaps  Solvejg 
can  tell  him  where  his  true  self  has  been.  And 
here  let  Ibsen  speak : 

Peer  Gynt.     Lost !  if  you  cannot  guess  riddles. 

Solvejg.     Ask  them. 

Peer  Gynt.  Ask  them  ?  ay,  verily !  Can  you  tell  me 
where  Peer  Gynt  has  been  since  last  we  met? 

Solvejg.     Where  he  has  been  ? 

Peer  Gynt.  With  the  mark  of  his  destiny  upon  his  brow  ; 
e'en  as  he  sprang  from  God's  thought  ?  Can  you  tell  me  that  ? 
If  not,  I  must  wend  me  home,  must  sink  into  the  land  of 
mists. 

Solvejg.     Oh,  that  riddle  is  easily  read. 

Peer  Gynt.  Then  say  what  you  know.  Where  have  I  been 
as  myself,  whole  and  true  ?  Where  have  I  been  with  God's 
stamp  on  my  brow  ? 

Solvejg  (smiling).     In  my  faith,  in  my  hope,  in  my  love. 

Peer  Gynt  (starting  back).  What  say  you  ?  Ha  !  they  are 
juggling  words.  To  that  boy  in  your  heart  ^  you  yourself  are 
the  mother. 

Solvejg.  His  mother  I  am.  But  who  is  his  father  ?  'Tis  he 
who  pardons  at  the  mother's  prayer. 

Peer  Gynt  (as  a  ray  of  light  from  the  rising  sun  falls  on 
him).  My  mother,  my  spouse,  thou  innocent  woman !  Oh, 
shield  me,  shield  me  in  thy  bosom !  (He  grips  fast  hold  of 
her  and  buries  his  face  in  her  lap.  Long  silence  as  the  sun 
rises.) 

Solvejg  (sings  softly).  Sleep  thou,  sleep,  my  darling  boy. 
I  will  rock  thee,  I  will  watch.  The  boy  has  sat  on  his 
mother's  lap.  They  two  have  played  the  whole  livelong  day. 
The  boy  has  rested  on  his  mother's  breast  the  whole  livelong 

^  "  Boy  in  the  heart  "= idea. 

13 


178  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

day.  God  bless  thee,  my  joy  !  The  boy  has  lain  so  close  to 
my  heart  the  whole  livelong  day.  Now  he  is  so  tired.  Sleep 
thou,  sleep,  my  darling  boy !     I  will  rock  thee,  I  will  watch. 

The  Button- Caster's  voice  (from  behind  the  house).  We 
meet  at  the  last  crossway,  Peer  ;  and  then  we  shall  see — I  say 
no  more. 

Solvejg  {sings  louder  as  the  day  strengthens).  I  will  rock 
thee,  I  will  watch.     Sleep  and  dream,  my  darling. 

It  is  true  that  Peer  Gynt  has  still  to  meet  the 
Button-moulder.  He  has  still  to  stand  up  at  the 
great  Assizes.  What  then  is  his  new  confidence  ? 
It  is  this  :  that  in  any  world  in  which  the  Button- 
moulder  has  a  place  there  will  be  a  place  likewise 
for  Solvejg. 

There  are  two  rocks  on  which  man  must  cast 
anchor, — or  be  wrecked, — woman  and  God.  For 
many  souls  those  two  rocks  are  outcroppings  of 
the  same  underlying  reef. 


III.   "La  Morte" 

There  is  a  sentence  in  Nathaniel  Hawthorne's 
most  notable  story  which  I  recall  from  a  remote 
memory,  with  which  I  may  begin  this  study.  The 
words  are  somewhat  to  this  effect :  God  help  two 
people,  a  man  and  a  woman,  if  one  or  the  other 
should  ever  learn  that  there  is  a  more  beautiful 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     179 

kind  of  love  than  that  to  which  they  have 
accustomed  each  other.  He  goes  on,  of  course, 
to  say  that  that  higher  way,  once  it  has  dawned 
upon  one  or  the  other,  will  make  the  lower  way 
intolerable,  and  a  tragedy,  secret  or  open,  will 
follow,  unless  those  two  can  find  some  deeper 
foundation  on  which  to  rebuild  the  shattered 
fabric  of  their  common  life.  Now  I  know  of  no 
idea  which  has  expressed  itself  so  persistently  in 
the  literature  of  the  soul  as  just  that  idea,  that 
there  is  a  quality  of  spiritual  light  which,  when  it 
falls  upon  a  human  life,  begins  there  and  then  to 
disturb,  to  provoke,  to  protest,  to  appeal,  to  arouse 
shame  and  anger,  and  at  the  same  time  hope  and 
the  passion  to  be  different.  When  that  ray  of 
white  light  falls  upon  a  soul  of  a  certain  quality, — 
and  the  great  affirmation  of  Christianity  is  that 
every  soul  is  at  its  depths  of  that  very  quality, — 
there  begins  to  work  at  its  centre  a  kind  of 
revulsion  which  soon  acquires  such  force  as  to 
tear  a  way  out  for  itself,  overturning,  if  need  be, 
the  habits  of  a  lifetime,  and  facing  as  a  very  light 
and  even  grateful  thing  the  retribution  of  society 
and  the  astonishment  and  forsaking  of  friends. 
Until  the  moment  when  that  light  dawned,  the 
man  was  able  to  control  his  thoughts  about  him- 


i8o  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

self.  He  had  his  times  of  uneasiness  ;  but  he  had 
learned  how  to  deal  with  himself  at  such  times. 
It  was  enough  simply  to  cease  from  some  practice 
which  aggravated  the  uneasiness,  or  for  a  season 
to  adopt  some  slight  severity  towards  himself 
which  seemed  to  have  the  effect  of  misleading, 
and,  for  the  time,  satisfying  the  inner  demand  of 
his  nature.  But  when  this  white  light  falls  upon 
him,  when  this  predestined  messenger  knocks  at 
his  door,  half-measures  no  longer  meet  his  case. 
He  must  either  rally  all  that  is  evil  within  him  to 
insult  and  browbeat  the  messenger  of  God — as 
when  Peter  kept  up  his  denial  for  a  time  by  the 
help  of  oaths ;  or  he  must  throw  wide  open  his 
door,  and  say  in  any  language  which  the  stress  of 
the  occasion  discovers  to  him  :  "  My  Lord  and 
my  God ! " 

There  is  no  single  fact  about  human  nature  to 
which  one  may  quote  such  a  unanimous  testimony 
from  all  great  literature  as  to  this  fact,  that  the 
soul  of  man  lies  open,  with  an  incurable  open- 
ness, to  the  challenge  and  appeal  of  the  holier 
way. 

The  face  of  Beatrice  let  loose  in  Dante  a  moral 
tide  which,  I  will  not  say  made  him  drag  his 
anchors,  but  compelled  him  to  carry  his  anchors, 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     i8i 

quite  unconscious  of  their  weight,  into  that  great 
sea  whose  farther  shore  was  Heaven. 

Pagan  as  he  was,  Goethe  also  knew  himself  too 
well  not  to  perceive  that  this  was  the  deepest 
thing  in  man,  his  liability  to  be  smitten  to  the 
centre  of  his  being,  and  sent  out  upon  his  new 
career  by  the  vision  of  something  holier  than  had 
come  into  his  philosophy.  ^  Let  me  save  you, 
Margaret,"  he  pleaded  in  the  dungeon  where  his 
poor  victim,  crazed  with  grief,  awaited  death,  "  let 
me  save  you."  "  How  save  me  ? "  she  asked ; 
"by  the  help  of  that  low  way  of  life  which  has 
been  our  bane  ? "  "  Yes,  let  us  flee  :  let  us 
resume  life  on  the  old  basis,"  Faust  pleaded.  To 
which  Margaret  answered :  "  Henry,  I  shudder 
at  thee  ! "  And  in  that  shudder  she  placed  a  live 
coal  on  the  altar  of  that  not  very  honourable 
heart. 

It  is  this  very  idea,  and  the  fertility  of  his 
applications  of  it,  which  for  myself  I  have  always 
held  to  be  the  distinctive  message  of  Robert 
Browning.  Caponsacchi  can  go  on  living  his 
double  life  with  only  slight  spasms  of  discomfort, 
until  one  day  he  sees  the  sweet  pure  face  of 
Pompilia.  Whereupon  the  world  begins  to  give 
way  under  him.     Away  along  the  corridors  of  his 


1 82  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

life  tapers  begin  to  light  up  the  darkness.  The 
life  he  had  been  leading  becomes  in  one  moment 
impossible  for  ever. 

Sebald  could  still  hold  down  the  man  of  God 
within  him,  could  still  confuse  his  conscience  with 
reasons  and  examples  from  the  behaviour  of  the 
world,  until  Pippa  went  by  that  spring  morning, 
singing.  Whereupon  there  was  kindled  in  him, 
and  through  him  in  Ottima,  a  moral  fire  which 
made  death  more  desirable  than  one  further  hour 
of  the  old  dishonour. 

Ned  Bratts  and  his  wife  could  brazen  out  the 
disgrace  and  punishment  of  this  and  that,  until,  in 
Bedford  Jail,  they  met  John  Bunyan,  who  took 
down  "the  Blessed  Book  "and  spoke  to  them 
about  God,  about  Christ,  about  forgiveness ; 
whereupon  it  was  with  them  also  as  if  something 
had  been  killed  for  ever,  and  something  had  been 
born. 

In  what  will  be  the  last  of  these  studies  we  shall 
see  how  Bernard  Shaw  has  made  a  handsome 
acknowledgment  of  this  ultimate  liability  of  the 
human  soul,  that,  given  the  proper  occasion,  a 
beautiful,  moral  tenderness  may  be  let  loose  in  a 
most  unlikely  heart,  by  its  contact  with  something 
gentle  and  uncorrupted  ;   in   the  particular  case, 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     183 

by  the  feeling  of  a  child's  fingers  on  a  wild  man's 
neck. 

In  the  light  of  the  literature  of  the  soul  we 
recover  our  confidence.  There  will  be  no 
apostasy  of  the  human  race.  There  may  be 
experiments.  There  will  be.  There  will,  in 
consequence,  be  many  a  sore  head,  and  many  a 
sore  heart.  But  "  securus  judicat  orbis  terrarum." 
We  never  know  the  day  of  the  Son  of  Man,  the 
day  when  here  and  there  the  human  soul  may  come 
to  itself,  when  here  and  there  man  may  cry  out 
for  a  new  bondage  in  God,  as  with  a  more  strident 
voice  he  has  been  crying  for  a  freedom  from  God. 
For  once  again  we  have  seen  what  we  have  seen, 
and  we  can  never  be  as  though  we  had  not  seen 
it.  Each  epoch  of  time  has  its  own  voice,  its 
own  emphasis  :  but  there  are  ancestral  voices 
to  which  man  is  for  ever  even  terribly  sus- 
ceptible. 

In  a  controversy  between  the  wind  and  the 
tide  the  issue  is  never  really  for  a  moment  in 
doubt.  There  may  be  much  noise,  but  the  deeper 
influence  has  its  way.  For  a  wind  is  local, 
whereas  a  tide  is  connected  with  the  moon,  and 
the  sun,  and  the  stars ;  and  there  are  great  times 
when  moon  and  sun  and  a  group  of  stars  are 


1 84  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

in  conjunction  and  pull  one  way.     In  the  firma- 
ment of  the   soul  such  great  times  are  always 
coming. 
•  •••••• 

Octave  Feuillet's  La  Morte  may  not  belong 
to  the  very  greatest  order  of  fiction  :  the  story 
is  too  conscious  of  its  own  moral.  And  yet  the 
story  deals  with  such  a  universal  interest,  and  does 
such  justice  to  the  conflicting  standpoints,  that  it 
will  bear  pondering  for  many  a  long  day. 

The  author  tells  us  explicitly  that  he  has  brought 
together  two  well-defined  types  of  character,  so 
that  he  may  observe  or  predict  how  things  will 
turn  out  with  them.  And  so  far  as  he  is  quite 
faithful  to  his  own  imagination  he  has  shown  us 
in  miniature  how  similar  lives  on  the  wide  scale  of 
a  general  society  will  also  work  out.  The  story 
deals  with  a  marriage  ;  and  there  at  once  we  are 
at  the  real  heart  of  the  controversy  between  the 
different  ways  of  looking  at  life.  For  any  way 
of  looking  at  life  which  claims  general  acceptance 
is  to  be  judged,  and  soon  or  late  will  come  to  be 
judged,  by  its  ability  to  carry  us  through  those 
elementary  human  functions,  one  of  which  is 
enshrined  in  Christian  marriage. 

La  Morie,  then,  consists  for  the  most  part  of 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     185 

letters  in  which  Bernard,  Vicomte  de  Vaudricourt 
(whom  we  shall  simply  call  "  Bernard  "  )  tells  his 
own  story.  He  describes  himself  as  one  who 
quite  early  in  his  manhood  had  come  under  the 
agnosticism  of  the  nineteenth  century.  He  had 
tenderness  enough  to  shed  tears  when  it  seemed 
to  him  no  longer  possible  to  believe.  He  bids  us 
take  his  word  for  it,  and  we  do,  that  it  was  not 
merely  to  justify  his  own  way  of  living  that  he 
abandoned  his  faith.  He  describes  himself,  in 
short,  to  use  a  phrase,  as  an  average  man 
about  town.  Of  an  old  family,  rich,  and  the 
prospective  heir  to  a  wealthy  uncle,  he  meets, 
with  a  view  to  marriage.  Mademoiselle  Aliette 
de  Courteheuse  (whom  we  shall  henceforth  call 
'•  Aliette  "). 

Belonging  to  a  family  of  equal  standing,  Aliette 
is  a  sensitive  and  ardent  Catholic.  She  was  the 
devoted  daughter  of  a  father  who  himself  had 
been  a  recluse,  defending  himself  from  the  con- 
tamination of  the  time  in  the  history  and  literature 
and  circumstances  of  what  seemed  to  him  an 
infinitely  better  time, — for  it  was  by  comparison 
an  age  of  faith — the  seventeenth  century.  But  let 
me  transcribe  a  scene.  Aliette  is  showing  Bernard 
the  library  of  the  Chateau.     He  has  remarked 


1 86 


ANCESTRAL  VOICES 


upon  its  richness  in  materials  of  the  seventeenth 
century. 

"Your  father  must  have  had  a  great  predilection  for  the 
century  of  Louis  XIV  ?  "  I  said. 

"  My  father  lived  in  it,"  she  replied  gravely. 

And  as  I  looked  at  her  with  a  somewhat  uneasy  surprise,  she 
added — 

"  And  he  made  me  live  in  it  with  him." 

The  eyes  of  this  strange  girl  filled  with  tears  as  she  spoke. 

She  turned  away  and  took  a  few  steps  to  repress  her  emotion ; 
then,  coming  back,  she  pointed  to  a  chair,  sat  down  herself  on 
the  library  footstool,  and  said — 

"  I  must  describe  my  father  to  you." 

She  paused  a  moment,  as  if  lost  in  thought ;  then,  speaking 
with  unaccustomed  freedom,  hesitating,  and  blushing  visibly 
whenever  she  was  about  to  pronounce  a  word  which  might 
appear  a  little  too  serious  from  such  young  lips,  she  continued : 

"My  father  died  from  the  effects  of  a  wound  which  he 
received  at  Patay.  To  tell  you  this,  is  to  say  that  he  loved 
his  country  but  he  did  not  love  the  time  in  which  he  lived. 
He  had  a  great  love  of  order,  and  he  saw  none  anywhere.  He 
had  a  perfect  horror  of  disorder,  and  this  he  saw  on  all  sides ; 
more  especially  towards  the  end  of  his  life,  everything  which 
occurred,  all  that  was  said  and  all  that  was  written,  was  sorely 
opposed  to  his  opinions,  to  all  that  he  respected,  and  to  all  his 
tastes.  Deeply  grieved  by  the  events  of  the  present,  he  took 
refuge  in  the  past ;  the  seventeenth  century  corresponded  more 
particularly  to  the  kind  of  society  in  which  he  would  have 
preferred  to  live ;  a  society  well-ordered,  polite,  believing  and 
lettered.  As  time  went  on,  he  liked,  more  and  more,  to  shut 
himself  up  with  that  period.  He  liked,  more  and  more,  to  see 
the  moral  discipline  and  the  literary  tastes  of  his  favourite 
century  take  precedence  in  his  house.  You  may  possibly  have 
remarked  that  he  encouraged  this  fancy  even  in  the  picture- 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     187 

frames  and  decorations.  From  this  window  you  can  see  the 
long  straight  alleys,  the  boxwood  edgings,  the  clipped  yew-trees, 
and  the  wych  elms  of  our  garden.  You  can  see  that  we  have 
in  our  flower-border  none  but  the  flowers  of  that  time — lilies, 
peonies,  hollyhocks,  marigolds,  pinks — in  short,  those  which 
are  called  parson's  flowers.  Our  old  sylvan  tapestries  are  also 
of  the  period.  You  see,  too,  that  all  our  furniture,  from  the 
wardrobes  and  the  sideboards  to  the  consoles  and  the  easy- 
chairs,  is  in  the  most  severe  style  of  the  time  of  Louis  XIV. 
My  father  had  no  taste  whatever  for  the  refined  affectations  of 
modern  luxury.  He  believed  that  excessive  comfort  enervated 
the  mind  as  well  as  the  body.  That  is  the  reason,"  added  the 
young  girl  laughingly,  "that  you  have  such  uncomfortable 
chairs  in  our  house.  Yes,  naturally.  You  are  going  to  speak 
of  compensations — Very  good ! " 

Then  resuming  her  grave  tone — 

"  In  this  way,  my  father  tried  to  carry  out  the  illusion  of 
living  in  the  epoch  upon  which  his  thoughts  were  always 
running.  Need  I  say  that  I  was  my  dearly  loved  father's 
confidant — the  sympathising  confidant  of  his  troubles,  the 
indignant  confidant  of  his  annoyances,  the  happy  confidant  of 
his  joys !  It  was  in  this  very  room — amidst  these  books  which 
we  read  together,  and  which  he  taught  me  to  love — it  was  here 
that  I  passed  the  happiest  hours  of  my  youth.  Together  we 
sang  the  praises  of  those  days  of  faith  and  tranquillity,  of  those 
safe  and  happy  moments  when  the  pure  and  beautiful  French 
language,  refined  taste,  and  high-bred  politeness  were  the  mark 
and  fame  of  our  country,  and  which  have  since  then  ceased  to 
be  so." 

She  paused,  slightly  confused  by  the  warmth  with  which  she 
had  uttered  the  last  words. 

I  said,  merely  for  the  sake  of  saying  something — 

"  You  fully  account  for  the  impression  often  made  upon  me 
by  your  home,  and  which,  at  times,  took  the  form  of  an 
hallucination — an  agreeable  one,   I  confess.      The  internal 


1 88  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

app)earance,  the  style,  and  the  whole  keeping  of  the  house 
carried  me  back  so  completely  for  two  hundred  years,  that  I 
should  not  have  been  much  surprised  to  have  heard  Monsieur 
le  Prince,  Madame  de  la  Fayette,  or  even  Madame  de  Sdvignd 
herself  announced  at  your  drawing-room  door." 

"  Would  to  Heaven  it  could  be  so  ! "  said  Mademoiselle  de 
Courteheuse.  "  How  I  love  all  those  good  people !  What 
delightful  company  they  would  be  !  What  pleasure  they  took 
in  elevated  ideas !  How  immensely  superior  they  were  to  the 
fashionable  people  of  the  present  day  ! " 

I  was  anxious  to  try  and  calm  down  her  enthusiastic  retro- 
spect, so  little  flattering  to  my  contemporaries  and  to  myself, 
so  I  remarked — 

"The  time  you  regret  certainly  had  exceptional  merits, 
which  I  appreciate  as  fully  as  you  do;  but  still,  we  must 
admit  that  underneath  this  society  which  was  so  well  balanced, 
so  well  ordered,  and  apparently  so  select,  there  existed  the 
very  same  sorrows  and  disorders  as  in  our  own.  I  see  here 
many  memoirs  of  that  time,  but,  of  course,  I  do  not  know 
which  of  them  you  have  read — or  not  read — and  consequently 
I  feel  slightly  embarrassed." 

She  interrupted  me — 

"  Oh,"  she  said  simply,  "  I  know  what  you  mean  quite  well. 
I  have  not  read  everything  here ;  but  I  have  read  enough  to 
know  that  my  ancient  friends  had  their  passions,  their  weak- 
nesses, their  errors,  just  like  the  people  of  to-day.  But,  as  my 
father  used  to  say,  all  these  were  founded  upon  a  serious  and 
solid  basis,  which  always  righted  itself.  Great  faults  were 
committed,  but  there  was  also  genuine  repentance.  There 
existed  an  upper  sphere,  where  everything  came  right  in  the 
end — even  wickedness." 

On  its  becoming  known  to  Aliette's  family  that 
Bernard  did  not  share  their  form  of  faith,   and 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     189 

was  not  even  a  Christian,  all  thought  of  marriage 
between  them  is  opposed.  Bernard,  on  his  side, 
most  scrupulous  as  he  is  not  to  encourage  the 
illusion  that  even  such  a  marriage  as  this,  which 
he  greatly  desires,  will  alter  his  mind  on  matters 
of  belief,  is  nevertheless  ready  to  pledge  his 
honour  that  he  will  leave  his  wife  entire  liberty 
there,  and  will  never  by  word,  or  action,  or 
innuendo,  seek  to  injure  or  deflect  her  mind.  On 
this  basis  the  marriage  is  agreed  upon  and  takes 
place.  But  not  until  an  uncle  of  Aliette's,  a  high 
dignitary  of  the  Church,  has  given  his  consent. 
This  in  his  case  rested  upon  the  hope,  which  he 
communicated  to  Aliette  herself,  that  there  was 
no  saying  what  influence  such  a  wife  might 
have. 

Thus  those  two  set  out  into  life ;  and  we  are 
asked  again  to  confess  by  the  witness  of  another 
illustration  that  two  cannot  go  far  together  unless 
they  be  agreed. 

They  make  their  home  in  Paris,  and  there 
very  soon  comes  the  rift  within  the  lute.  Aliette 
tries  bravely  to  live  her  own  life,  defending  and 
nourishing  her  soul,  and  at  the  same  time  to  go 
out  with  Bernard,  meeting  the  world  on  its  own 
ground.     Bernard  sees  clearly  what  it  is  all  costing 


I90  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

his  wife,  and  in  course  of  time  becomes  impatient. 
Now  and  then  he  allows  some  reckless  word  to 
escape,  for  which  he  never  fails  indeed  to  rebuke 
himself.  Aliette  likewise,  even  more  scrupulous 
than  he,  in  terror  of  losing  her  husband's  love,  or 
of  failing  in  her  duty  as  a  wife,  makes  heroic 
attempts  to  compromise  with  the  higher  in- 
sistences of  her  nature,  and  steels  her  spirit  to 
mingle  freely  in  her  husband's  world,  which  was 
just  the  world. 

But  it  seemed  to  her  like  being  on  board  a  sinking  ship 
where  the  officers  instead  of  doing  their  duty  were  making 
themselves  drunk  with  the  crew. 

One  day,  their  conversation  having  fallen  upon  the  moral 
condition  of  the  poorer  classes,  with  whom  Aliette's  charitable 
disposition  brought  her  into  frequent  contact,  the  young  wife 
ventured  to  say  that,  unfortunately,  lessons  in  materialism 
were  given  to  the  people  only  too  often  by  the  higher  classes 
of  society. 

"  You  are  quite  right,"  said  Bernard,  "  and  I  really  do  not 
know  where  we  are  all  going  to  at  this  rate,  nor  what  terrible 
things  will  happen  next ;  but,  as  we  can  do  nothing,  the  best 
way  is  not  to  think  about  it." 

"Like  Louis  XV?"  replied  Aliette.  "But  are  you  quite 
sure  that  nothing  can  be  done  ?  Do  you  not  think  that  the 
abolition  of  all  religious  belief,  of  all  hope  beyond  this  life,  of 
all  recourse  to  God,  has  a  great  deal  to  do  with  this  furious 
and  all-absorbing  eagerness  for  present  enjoyment,  at  which 
you  yourself  are  alarmed  ?  " 

"On  the  contrary,  I  am  convinced  of  it,"  said  Bernard. 
"  But  what  then  ?    What  are  you  driving  at  ?     Is  it  my  fault 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     191 

if  the  earth  turns  round  ?  Is  it  my  fault  if  unbelief  reigns  high 
and  low,  and  invades  all  classes  ?  Do  you  mean  to  insinuate 
that  I  ought  to  set  an  example  to  the  people  ?  An  example  of 
what  I  should  like  to  know,  since  I  believe  in  nothing  ?  The 
example  of  hypocrisy  and  sacrilege  ?  " 

Aliette  turned  very  pale  and  made  no  answer. 

"  My  dear,"  he  went  on  in  a  hard  tone,  "  you  are  contending 
for  the  impossible.  You  are  a  Christian  in  reality  in  the 
midst  of  a  society  which  is  so  only  in  name.  You  cannot 
reform  the  century  in  which  you  live.  You  cannot  turn  Paris 
of  the  nineteenth  century  into  a  Port  Royal,  of  which  you  would 
be  the  Mother  Angelique.  Do  for  goodness'  sake  give  up  the 
idea !  And  especially  I  beg  of  you  give  up  the  idea  of  bring- 
ing me  back,  me  personally,  to  your  way  of  thinking.  You 
are  possessed  with  the  mania  of  converting  me,  and,  to  speak 
frankly,  it  annoys  me  a  little,  for  I  am  conscious  of  it  under 
your  slightest  words  and  actions.  .  .  .  Give  up  this  idea  once 
and  for  all :  do  not  think  about  it  any  more,  and  you  will  see 
what  a  relief  it  will  be  to  our  two  unhappy  lives." 

Aliette  could  only  look  at  him  with  the  tearful,  beseeching 
eyes  of  some  dumb  creature  at  the  last  extremity.  His  natural 
good  temper  returned  to  him,  and  sitting  down  beside  her,  he 
said  in  a  gentler  tone — 

"I  am  wrong,  dear.  As  to  conversion,  one  must  never 
despair  of  anything  or  anybody.  Do  you  remember  Monsieur 
de  Ranee,  for  instance,  who  is  of  our  own  day  ?  Well,  before 
becoming  the  reformer  of  the  Trappists,  he  had  been  like  my- 
self, a  worldling  and  a  great  sceptic,  what  was  then  called  a 
libertine.  For  all  that,  he  became  a  saint !  It  is  true  that 
there  was  a  terrible  reason.  You  know  what  brought  about 
his  conversion  ?  " 

Aliette  made  a  sign  that  she  did  not  know. 

"Well,  he  came  back  to  Paris  after  an  absence  of  some 
days  and  found  her  whom  he  loved  dead  .  .  .  her  head 
severed." 


192 


ANCESTRAL  VOICES 


"  If  I  were  sure,"  said  Aliette,  "  that  my  head  would  have 
the  same  power,  I  should  be  glad  to  die." 

One  only  needs  insight  to  foresee  how  things 
will  end.  Aliette's  health  gives  way  under  the 
strain  of  this  discordant  life.  On  a  certain  night 
which  brought  incidents  to  which  Bernard  con- 
fessed he  had  no  right  to  expose  his  wife,  Aliette 
swooned  away.  It  was  long  before  she  recovered, 
and  when  at  length  she  did  regain  consciousness, 
it  was  to  beseech  her  husband  with  tears  to  allow 
her  to  live  her  own  life. 

They  returned  to  the  country.  The  days  that 
followed  were  the  happiest  she  had  ever  known. 
The  quiet  and  regularity  of  her  life,  the  care  of 
Jeanne,  her  little  girl,  occupied  and  soothed  her. 
Bernard  too  for  a  time  seemed  to  be  satisfied. 
But  soon  the  weather  of  his  soul  changed,  and 
events  followed  close  upon  one  another  towards 
the  catastrophe.  Their  little  daughter  fell  sud- 
denly ill  of  a  diphtheria  which  threatened  to 
carry  her  off.  An  operation  became  immediately 
necessary.  It  was  too  late  to  bring  a  surgeon 
from  the  city.  Bernard  \astened  to  a  neigh- 
bouring house  where  a  stranger,  a  celebrated 
doctor,  with  his  niece  or  cousin,  was  staying 
temporarily.     This  man,  Dr.  Vallehaut,  and  his 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     193 

niece,  Sabine,  returned  with  Bernard,  and  the 
child's  life  was  saved. 

Dr.  Vallehaut  is  a  man  of  science  who,  like 
Bernard,  has  lost  all  faith  in  revealed  religion; 
but  the  absence  of  faith  has  not  yet  robbed  his 
life  of  ideals.  The  quest  of  pure  truth,  the  hope 
of  devoting  the  results  of  his  research  to  the  good 
of  man,  serve  in  the  case  of  one  of  his  tempera- 
ment to  keep  him  free  from  cynicism  and  any  low 
way  of  conceiving  life.  It  is  left,  as  we  shall  see 
in  a  moment,  to  his  cousin  Sabine  to  carry  out  the 
principles  of  religious  negation  to  their  logical 
issue  in  life  and  action. 

Dr.  Vallehaut  has  still  effectively  within  him- 
self the  moral  reminiscences  of  religion.  Sabine, 
who  belongs  to  the  next  generation,  has  no  such 
reminiscences :  she  is  the  author's  warning  of 
what  we  are  to  expect  in  the  second  generation 
of  a  materialistic  and  irreligious  community. 

But  to  resume. — A  friendship  as  deep  as  was 
possible  among  such  discordant  people  grew  up 
between  Aliette  and  her  husband  on  the  one 
hand,  and  the  Doctor  and  Sabine.  Bernard  in 
particular  sees  a  good  deal  of  the  Doctor's  cousin, 
and  both  of  them  hover  on  the  edge  of  folly. 

In  consequence  doubtless  of  the  strain,  Aliette's 
>3 


194  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

health  gives  way.  At  first  there  is  no  ground  for 
alarm ;  the  Doctor  reassures  them  and  leaves  his 
cousin,  who,  by  the  way,  is  betrothed  to  him,  to 
act  as  nurse,  her  duty  being  to  give  the  patient  a 
potion  at  intervals.  Aliette,  however,  does  not 
recover.  One  day  Bernard,  taking  the  potion 
from  Sabine's  hand,  gives  it  to  his  wife,  who,  as 
she  takes  it,  looks  into  his  eyes  with  a  searching 
gaze  which  almost  freezes  his  blood.  She  drinks 
the  potion,  and  next  day  dies.  It  had  contained 
aconite,  a  slow  and  untraceable  poison  which  had 
been  placed  there  by  Sabine. 

According  to  his  daily  custom,  Monsieur  Vallehaut  con- 
ducted his  ward  to  the  door  of  her  room,  kissed  her  forehead, 
shook  her  by  the  hand,  and  withdrew  to  his  own  apartment. 

About  an  hour  and  a  half  afterwards,  when  he  thought 
Sabine  would  be  asleep.  Dr.  Vallehaut,  who  had  not  gone  to 
bed  himself,  left  his  room  with  great  caution,  went  down  the 
long  passage  and  descended  the  stairs.  The  candlestick, 
which  he  held  in  his  hand,  illumined  the  pallor  and  contrac- 
tion of  the  face.  He  entered  the  large  room,  on  the  ground- 
floor,  which  served  him  as  a  drawing-room  and  library,  and 
from  there,  raising  a  heavy  tapestry  curtain,  he  passed  into  the 
laboratory.  He  went  straight  to  a  kind  of  sideboard  of  old 
oak,  which  filled  up  one  of  the  angles  of  the  wall,  and  in 
which  the  dangerous  substances  which  he  used  in  making  up 
his  medicines  and  in  his  experiments  were  locked  up.  This 
sideboard  was  fastened  by  one  of  those  locks  which  have  no 
key,  and  of  which  it  is  necessary  to  know  the  secret  combina- 
tion.   After  he  had  turned  the  revolving  plate  of  the  lock,  Dr. 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     195 

Vallehaut  seemed  to  hesitate  for  some  seconds  before  opening 
the  panel  of  the  cabinet; — then,  with  a  violent  gesture,  he 
opened  the  panel.  His  pale  forehead  immediately  became  of 
a  livid  tint ;  in  one  of  the  rows  of  bottles  which  were  ranged 
on  the  highest  shelf  his  first  glance  revealed  an  empty  space. 
At  the  same  moment  there  escaped  from  his  agitated  and  con- 
vulsed lips  a  word  uttered  feebly  as  a  breath — 

"Aconite!" 

All  at  once  it  seemed  to  him  that  he  heard  a  slight  noise  in 
the  interior  of  the  house.  He  extinguished  his  candle,  and 
listened  attentively.  A  few  minutes  afterwards,  he  distinctly 
heard  the  gliding  of  a  furtive  step,  and  the  rustling  of  a  silk 
dress  in  the  next  room.  He  went  quickly  to  the  door  and 
waited.  The  night  was  beautifully  fine,  and  was  illuminated 
by  a  crescent  moon,  which  threw  its  white  rays  across  the 
windows  and  into  the  laboratory.  The  curtain  of  the  door 
was  raised  and  Sabine  appeared;  at  the  same  instant  the  hand 
of  Dr.  Vallehaut  was  laid  heavily  upon  the  arm  of  his  ward. 

The  young  girl  uttered  a  stifled  cry,  and  in  her  first  alarm 
dropped  a  small  bottle  which  fell  with  a  ring  on  the  stone 
floor.  She  drew  back,  and  ran  into  the  next  room.  Near  the 
large  centre  table  she  stopped  abruptly,  and  leaning  heavily 
upon  it  with  one  hand,  she  faced  her  approaching  guardian. 

In  the  library,  as  in  the  laboratory,  the  windows  opening 
into  the  garden  had  no  shutters,  and  the  polar  clearness  of 
the  sky  spread  a  half-light  in  patches  across  the  room. 
Monsieur  Vallehaut  could  perceive  an  air  of  wild  bravado 
on  Sabine's  face  and  in  her  eyes. 

"  Unhappy  girl,"  he  said  to  her  in  a  hollow  voice,  "  defend 
yourself.  Say  that  you  have  made  some  mistake ;  aconite  is 
also  a  medicine ;  you  have  seen  me  employ  it,  myself,  some- 
times. You  have  perhaps  been  imprudent,  careless,  and  you 
were  afraid  that  I  should  blame  you.  That  is  why  you  were 
hiding  yourself.     Come,  speak  ! " 

"  What  is  the  use  ?  "  she  answered,  with  a  disdainful  wave  of 


196  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

the  hand;  "you  would  not  believe  me;  you  do  not  believe 
your  own  words." 

The  unhappy  man  sank  down  into  the  easy-chair  in  which 
he  was  accustomed  to  write,  talking  aloud  to  himself  in  his 
deep  trouble. 

"  No,"  he  murmured,  "  it  is  true.  It  would  be  impossible ; 
she  could  not  have  made  so  great  a  mistake !  Alas !  she 
knew  only  too  well  what  she  was  doing.  With  what  infernal 
skill  she  chose  the  poison,  the  effects  of  which  should  imitate 
the  symptoms  of  the  disease  itself,  be  mistaken  for  them,  and 
aggravate  them,  very  gently,  till  death  resulted !  Yes,  it  is  a 
crime;  an  odious,  premeditated  crime  against  that  gentle, 
lovable  creature ! " 

And  after  a  silence — 

"  Oh  what  a  miserable  dupe  I  have  been  ! " 

Then,  raising  his  head  towards  Sabine — 

"Tell  me  at  least  that  her  husband  is  your  accomplice; 
that  it  is  he  who  has  induced  you  to  commit  this  infamous 
deed ! " 

"No,"  said  Sabine,  "he  knew  nothing  of  it.  I  love  him, 
and  I  know  that  I  am  loved  by  him.     Nothing  more." 

Dr.  Vallehaut,  after  minutes  of  speechless  dejection,  resumed 
firmly,  but  in  a  distinctly  altered  voice — 

"Sabine,  if  you  have  counted  on  a  criminal  weakness  on 
my  part,  you  have  not  known  me ;  my  duty,  from  this  moment, 
is  to  hand  you  over  to  justice ;  and  however  horrible  such  a 
duty  may  be,  I  shall  perform  it." 

"You  will  think  twice,  uncle,  before  doing  so,"  the  girl 
said  coldly,  standing  on  the  other  side  of  the  table,  and  facing 
her  guardian,  "for  if  you  give  me  up  to  justice,  if  you  give 
society  the  pleasure  of  witnessing  such  a  trial  in  court,  you 
must  foresee  what  the  world  will  say :  it  will  say  that  I  am 
your  pupil,  and  it  will  say  nothing  but  the  truth  ! " 

"  My  pupil,  wretched  girl  ?  Have  I  ever  taught  you  other 
principles  than  those  which  I  practise  myself?    Have  I  ever 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     197 

given  you,  by  precept  or  example,  other  lessons  than  those  of 
uprightness,  justice,  humanity  and  honour  ?  " 

"  You  surprise  me,  uncle.  How  is  it  that  such  a  mind  as 
yours  has  never  foreseen  that  I  might  extract,  from  your 
doctrines  and  from  our  common  studies,  conclusions  and 
teachings  different  from  those  which  you  drew  from  them 
yourself?  The  tree  of  science,  uncle,  does  not  produce  the 
same  fruit  upon  every  soil.  You  speak  to  me  of  uprightness, 
of  justice,  of  humanity,  of  honour?  You  are  astonished 
that  the  same  theories  which  have  inspired  you  with  these 
virtues  have  not  inspired  me  with  the  same  ?  The  explanation 
is,  however,  quite  simple;  you  know,  as  well  as  I  do,  that 
these  sham  virtues  are,  in  reality,  free  to  be  acquired,  or 
not ;  since  they  are  only  instincts,  veritable  prejudices  imposed 
upon  us  by  nature,  because  she  requires  them  for  the  preserva- 
tion and  the  carrying  on  of  her  work.  It  pleases  you  to 
submit  yourself  to  these  instincts,  and  it  does  not  please  me 
to  do  so,  that  is  all." 

"  But  have  I  not  told  you,  and  repeated  to  you  a  thousand 
times,  you  wretched  creature,  that  duty,  honour,  even 
happiness  consisted  in  submission  to  these  natural,  these 
divine  laws  ?  " 

"  You  have  told  me  so :  you  believe  it ;  I  believe  the 
contrary.  I  believe  that  the  duty,  the  honour  of  a  human 
being  is  to  rebel  against  such  servitude,  to  shake  off  these 
fetters  with  which  nature,  or  God,  as  you  like,  leads  us  and 
oppresses  us,  in  order  to  make  us  work,  in  spite  of  ourselves, 
towards  an  unknown  end ;  towards  a  work  in  which  we  have 
no  interest.  Ah  yes  !  you  have  indeed  told  me,  and  repeated 
to  me,  that  for  you  it  was  not  only  a  duty,  but  a  joy,  to 
humbly  contribute,  by  your  works  and  your  virtues,  towards 
I  know  not  what  divine  work,  I  know  not  what  superior  and 
mysterious  point,  towards  which  the  universe  is  progressing. 
But,  really,  those  are  pleasures  to  which  I  am  perfectly 
insensible.     I  care  very  little,  I  swear  to  you,  to  deny  myself, 


198  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

to  force  myself  to  suffer  all  my  life,  in  order  to  prepare  a 
state  of  happiness  and  perfection  for  I  know  not  what  future 
humanity — a  state  which  I  shall  not  enjoy,  festivals  to  which 
I  shall  not  go,  and  a  paradise  into  which  I  shall  have  no 
entrance." 

Under  the  influence  of  the  emotions  which  agitated  her 
in  this  awful  moment,  her  speech,  at  first  calm  and  icy, 
became,  little  by  little,  more  animated,  and  gradually  assumed 
a  character  of  violent  exultation.  She  had  quitted  her  first 
attitude,  and  commenced  to  walk,  with  slow  steps,  from  one 
end  of  the  library  to  the  other,  stopping  at  intervals  to 
accentuate  her  remarks  by  an  energetic  gesture.  Monsieur 
Vallehaut,  still  motionless  in  his  easy-chair,  answered  her 
only  by  vague  exclamations  of  indignation,  and  his  eye 
appeared  to  follow,  with  an  air  of  stupefaction,  this  spectral 
shadow  now  disappearing  in  the  darkness,  now  plainly  visible 
in  the  pale  light  which  came  from  outside. 

"Must  I  tell  you  everything?"  she  continued.  "I  was 
mortally  tired :  tired  of  the  present,  of  the  past,  of  the  future. 
The  idea  of  passing  my  life  here,  poring  over  your  books 
or  over  your  furnaces,  with  the  perspective  of  the  final 
perfection  of  the  universe  for  my  whole  satisfaction  and  for 
all  my  comfort,  this  idea  was  insupportable  to  me.  Such  a 
life  may  suffice  for  a  being  who  is  all  brain,  like  you;  but 
for  those  who  have  nerves  under  the  skin,  blood  in  the  veins, 
and  passions  in  the  heart,  never.  I  am  a  woman,  and  I  have 
all  the  aspirations,  all  the  passions  of  a  woman;  these  are 
even  more  powerful  in  me  than  they  are  in  others,  because 
I  have  neither  the  superstitions  nor  the  prejudices  which, 
with  others,  may  deaden  them.  I  dreamt  of  great  love,  I 
dreamt  of  a  luxurious  life,  of  amusements,  of  elegance,  in 
the  midst  of  the  pleasures  of  society.  I  felt  that  fate  had 
bestowed  on  me  all  the  gifts  which  would  enable  me  to 
enjoy  these  things  in  their  fulness,  and  I  was  called  upon 
to  renounce  them  for  ever.    To  what  end  would  this  in- 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     199 

dependence  of  spirit  which  I  had  acquired  have  served  me 
then  ?  Of  what  use  was  all  my  science,  if  I  did  not  extract 
from  it  some  opportunity  for  my  ambitions,  some  weapon  for 
my  passions?  An  occasion  presented  itself.  I  loved  this 
man,  and  I  felt  that  he  loved  me.  I  felt  that,  were  he  free, 
he  would  marry  me.  And  then — I  did  what  I  have  done ! 
A  crime  ?  Nothing  but  a  word !  What  is  good,  and  what 
is  evil?  What  is  true,  or  what  is  false?  In  reality,  you 
know  very  well  that  the  code  of  human  morality  has  to-day 
become  nothing  but  a  blank  page,  on  which  each  one  writes 
what  he  likes,  according  to  his  intellect  and  his  temperament. 
Individual  catechisms  are  the  only  ones  left  to  us.  Mine 
is  the  very  same  which  nature  teaches  me  by  her  example; 
she  eliminates  everything  which  annoys  her  with  impassible 
egotism ;  she  suppresses  everything  that  opposes  itself  to  her 
aims ;  she  crushes  out  the  weak  to  make  room  for  the  strong. 
And  be  assured,  it  is  not  now  for  the  first  time  that  this 
doctrine  obtains  with  really  free  and  superior  minds.  It  has 
been  said  since  all  time,  '  Good  people  are  taken  away.'  No ! 
it  is  the  weak  ones  who  disappear,  and  they  only  do  what  is 
their  duty;  and  when  one  assists  them  a  little,  one  only 
does  after  all  the  same  thing  as  God.  Read  your  Darwin 
over  again,  my  uncle." 

On  reading  such  a  passage  as  that  one  feels 
that,  far  from  it  being  strange  and  irrational 
that  people  should  ever  have  gone  to  war  about 
religion,  the  one  thing  which  men  might  at  any- 
time quite  justifiably  go  to  war  about  is  just 
religion  and  the  moral  implications  of  religion. 
After  reading  such  a  passage, — and  the  inferences 
seem  to  me  to  be  quite  logical,  and  granted  the 


200  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

premisses,  quite  inevitable,  —  one  feels  that 
thoroughgoing  unbelievers  may  yet  have  to  be 
exterminated  for  poisoning  the  wells  and  threaten- 
ing to  bring  human  life  to  a  standstill. 

After  a  suitable  lapse  of  time,  Bernard  marries 
Sabine ;  and  once  again  we  have  the  materials 
for  a  tragedy  which  will  balance  the  earlier  one. 
This  later  tragedy  we  shall  not  pursue. 

A  short  time  only  is  needed  for  these  two  to 
cease  even  pretending  to  respect  one  another; 
and  on  Sabine's  individualistic  theories  of  life, 
the  moment  a  relationship  ceases  to  bind,  it 
ceases  to  be  binding.  They  separate.  Bernard's 
heart  turns  to  his  little  daughter  whom  he  has 
left  with  Aliette's  mother  in  the  old  Chdteau. 
The  child  is  in  the  care  of  an  old  nurse,  Victoire, 
who  had  been  Aliette's  nurse.  On  Bernard's 
proposing  to  take  away  his  child,  Victoire 
vigorously  objects,  saying  that  if  he  persists  in 
taking  the  child,  she,  Victoire,  will  then  believe 
what  she  has  not  yet  allowed  herself  to  believe, 
that  he,  Bernard,  was  an  accomplice  with  Sabine 
in  the  poisoning  of  Aliette. 

The  Pope  in  The  Ring  and  the  Book 
describes  how  once  upon  a  time  he  stood  in 
Naples.     It  was  a  night  of  the  blackest  darkness  ; 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     201 

no  town,  no  sea,  no  sky !  Suddenly  there  was 
a  lightning  flash,  by  which  for  one  moment  he 
saw  everything.  Just  so  did  those  words  of  the 
old  nurse  light  up  the  mystery  of  poor  Aliette's 
last  days.  He  remembered  her  last  look,  and 
in  that  moment  something  began  to  break,  to 
melt,  to  yield  within  him. 

"  She  died,  believing  me  guilty !  It  is  a 
frightful  idea !  I  cannot  bring  myself  to  think 
of  it ;  so  fragile,  so  tender,  so  gentle  a  being. 
Yes,  she  said  to  herself,  *  My  husband  is  a 
murderer.  What  he  is  giving  me  to  take  is 
poison,  and  he  knows  it  to  be  so.'  And  she 
died  with  this  thought,  her  last  thought :  and 
never,  never  will  she  know  that  it  is  not  true. 
O,  Lord  God  Almighty,  if  You  exist.  You  see 
what  I  suffer :  have  pity  on  me.  Ah,  that  I 
could  believe  that  all  is  not  finished  between 
her  and  myself ;  that  she  sees  me  ;  that  she  hears 
me  ;  that  she  knows  the  truth." 

Thus  the  dead  Aliette  began  her  reign.  For, 
as  I  have  said  more  than  once  in  these  studies, 
we  do  not  know  ourselves,  and  do  not  know  how 
we  shall  behave  in  the  great  waters. 

The  race  is  older  than  the  individual.  It  may 
need  some  great  thing  to  break  up  that  hard 


202  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

crust  with  which  our  conventional  life  overlays 
and  conceals  the  qualities  of  our  essential  and 
abiding  human  nature.  But  life  is  full  of  ex- 
periences, any  one  of  which  may  become  such 
a  ploughshare  in  the  hand  of  God. 

Bernard,  exhausted  by  grief,  fell  a  prey  to 
disease.  Something  sinister  made  its  appearance 
in  his  throat.  Feeling  his  end  draw  near,  he 
sent  for  Aliette's  uncle,  the  Bishop.  He  wished 
to  die  in  Aliette's  religion.  And  so  she  had  her 
way ;  or,  God  had  His  way  through  her. 

Here,  once  again,  we  have  been  considering  a 
case  which  in  its  essentials  need  not  be  at  all 
unusual  or  curious.  It  is  another  illustration,  on 
the  testimony  and  authority  of  a  true  imagination, 
that  the  human  soul  moves  in  an  orbit  round  a 
central  sun,  so  that  at  the  limit  of  its  apogee  it  is 
already  coming  back. 

Of  this  also  we  have  had  another  illustration, 
namely,  that  a  life  of  moral  disorder  is  already 
discovering  and  creating  its  own  tragedy,  out  of 
which  it  will  at  length  cry  out. 

And  of  this,  finally,  we  have  had  an  illustration, 
and  it  prepares  us  for  the  studies  which  shall 
follow, — that  for  everyone  who  in  this  world  has 
wronged  another  there  is  but  one  way  back  to 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     203 

self-respect,  to  peace,  to  God,  and  it  by  kneeling 
in  perfect  humility  before  the  face,  alive  or  dead, 
of  that  one  whom  he  has  wronged. 

And  there  again  we  enter  that  Valley  of  the 
Spirit,  at  the  head  of  which  and  against  a 
wonderful  sky,  stands  for  ever  the  Cross  of 
Calvary. 

IV.  The  Redemption  of  our  Solitude 
(Dostoievsky,  Tolstoy,  Bernard  Shaw) 

I  think  we  have  now  abandoned  for  ever  that 
way  of  dealing  with  august  and  accepted  facts  of 
human  nature,  or  of  society,  which  was  the  first- 
fruits  of  the  scientific  spirit,  and  remained  in 
vogue  until  a  saner  and  severer  scientific  method 
found  it  wanting. 

The  formula  was,  to  trace  some  highly  de- 
veloped state  of  mind  or  social  institution  to  its 
primitive  and  rudimentary  form.  Then,  with  an 
appearance  of  logic  and  candid  thinking,  to  leave 
us  to  conclude,  in  the  first  place,  that  anything 
which  is  so  natural  must  somehow  not  be  authori- 
tative for  man ;  and,  in  the  second  place,  that 
anything  which  had  such  a  mean  beginning,  and 
which  at  the  outset  sustained  itself  by  the  help  of 


204  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

ideas  and  of  a  view  of  life  which  are  no  longer 
possible,  cannot  be  expected  to  have  our  moral 
and  intellectual  assent  in  these  days  when  we  all 
know  so  much. 

The  method  was  always  the  same.  Indeed,  I 
believe  its  dullness  and  monotony  contributed  to 
its  overthrow.  It  ceased  to  be  interesting.  The 
intention  was  so  obvious,  and  the  process  in  each 
case  so  precisely  the  same  as  in  every  other.  It 
all  worked  with  such  neatness  and  reasonableness, 
that  men's  minds  began  to  be  quite  sure  that  it 
was  not  the  whole  truth.  Man  was  alleged  to 
have  affinities  with  the  lower  creatures.  It  took 
some  time  for  us  to  see  that  this  account  of  man 
left  out  any  explanation  of  the  very  things  in  man 
which,  as  we  say,  make  a  man  of  him.  For  the 
decisive  thing  about  man,  the  characteristic  thing, 
lies,  of  course,  not  in  those  features  which  he 
shares  in  common  with  lower  creatures ;  but  in 
those  features,  those  prejudices,  and  a  certain 
resiliency  of  spirit,  which  are  entirely  his  own, 
and  amongst  these  the  indomitable  prepossession 
that  he  is  not  a  lower  creature.  When  you  pro- 
pose to  a  company  of  men  to-day  that  they  should 
regard  themselves  as  mere  animals,  on  the  ground 
that  once  upon  a  time  they  were  little  if  anything 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     205 

better,  that  company  of  men  may  shudder  at  your 
words,  or  they  may  laugh  at  you,  or,  if  they 
happen  at  the  moment  to  be  in  one  of  those  fierce 
moods  which  descend  upon  us  from  time  to  time, 
they  may  even  put  you  to  death.  And  you  are 
bound  to  explain  that  shudder,  that  laughter,  and 
that  fierceness  in  which  man  separates  himself 
from  all  other  creatures,  and  reveals  something 
essential  and  central  to  his  own  nature. 

By  the  same  reasoning  it  was  discovered  that 
**  morals  "  was  but  another  word  for  "  manners." 
The  Latin  word  was  given,  and  we  were  left 
with  the  insinuation  that  our  private  and  social 
moralities  were  simply  the  strictures  which  men 
had  placed  upon  themselves  in  bygone  times  in 
order  to  dwell  together  in  unity  and  to  hold  their 
own.  In  any  case,  these  private  and  social 
moralities  were  to  be  considered  as  the  tene- 
ments and  dwelling-places  of  the  spirit  of  fear, 
of  physical  fear,  or  of  religious  fear, — and  this,  of 
course,  had  vanished  in  the  general  enlightenment. 

We  need  not,  however,  further  illustrate  the 
method  of  reasoning,  though  it  was  applied  in 
every  field,  and  assailed  all  the  securities  for 
essential  human  life  in  our  laws  and  in  the 
Christian  faith.     The  method  has  been  frankly 


2o6  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

abandoned,  and  in  this  very  sense  that  it  is  now 
employed  to  support  an  entirely  opposite  con- 
clusion. The  fact  that  man  has  arisen  from  lowly 
conditions,  and  has  improved  his  status,  is  now 
made  the  basis,  not  for  a  contempt  of  ideals :  it 
has  become,  on  the  contrary,  the  ground  of  a  new 
rhetoric  concerning  human  nature  which  may  run 
to  its  own  excess.  When  we  say  nowadays  that 
man  arose  from  lowly  conditions,  we  put  the 
emphasis  upon  the  fact  that  he  arose.  For  if  he 
arose,  it  was  by  virtue  of  something  within  him 
which  was  never  satisfied  with  its  achievement  at 
any  particular  stage,  something  which  made  him 
weary  of  every  resting-place ;  and,  if  he  lingered 
on,  that  weariness  deepened  into  shame.  And 
so,  in  our  day,  man  is  being  conceived  as  a  being 
who  bears  within  himself  a  spirit,  an  impulse,  still 
fresh  and  unexhausted,  which,  simply  because  it  has 
led  him  on  so  far,  must  continue  to  lead  him  on. 

Concerning  the  true  nature  of  that  mysterious 
urgency,  we  know — apart  from  the  illumination 
of  faith — nothing  for  certain  except  this,  that  it 
compels  man  onwards,  in  the  line  and  direction 
of  his  earlier  progress,  never  to  the  denial  or 
frustrating  of  any  moral  dignity  to  which  he  had 
attained,  but  always  to  some  further  and  finer 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     207 

application  of  itself.  Man's  progress,  in  short,  is 
seen  to  lie  along  the  line  of  a  fuller  expression, 
of  a  more  sensitive  apprehension  of  a  principle 
of  his  nature,  concerning  which  no  fair-minded 
observer  can  be  in  doubt  as  to  its  tendency  in 
past  times,  and  as  to  the  destiny  it  is  seeking  to 
accomplish  in  the  midst  of  all  our  failures  and 
protests  and  secret  strife. 

It  is  true  that  society  might  again  be  convulsed 
by  war,  and  war  of  such  violence  and  duration 
that  the  more  delicate  achievements  of  man's 
moral  sense  might  be  entirely  lost.  Or  there 
might  occur  in  our  day,  or  in  a  later  time,  some- 
thing which  invaded  and  overwhelmed  our  heaped- 
up  civilisation,  as  the  Goths  and  Vandals  swept 
over  Europe. 

In  such  a  day,  in  a  sheer  struggle  for  life,  the 
finer  things  of  the  soul  would  shrink  back  and 
hide  behind  the  coarse  and  more  necessary 
faculties.  Round  the  platter  of  life  the  tiger  in 
man  would  whet  his  teeth  anew.  The  airy  fret- 
work of  the  spirit,  the  more  exquisite  and  subtle 
perceptions  and  demands,  would  all  go  down  in 
that  dark  day.^ 

*  These  two  paragraphs  were  written  when  the  sky  in  Europe 
was  still  as  clear  as  it  had  been  for  ten  years. 


2o8  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

But,  unless  that  day  returns,  the  moral  sense  in 
man  will  become  more  and  more  individual  and 
delicate  and  subtle.  His  sins,  the  failures  with 
which  he  charges  himself,  will  also  become  more 
individual  and  delicate  and  subtle.  He  will 
arrive  at  a  day  in  the  evolution  and  refinement  of 
his  nature, — a  day  which  has  in  every  age  dawned 
upon  elect  and  rarer  souls, — when  he  will  live  by 
the  guidance  of  secret  and  spiritual  signs,  in  an 
intenser  solitude,  liable  to  the  thrustings  and 
hauntings  of  most  delicate  fears,  and  to  the 
encouragement  and  appeal  of  equally  intangible 
approvals :  the  condition  indeed  predicted  in  a 
verse  of  a  psalm  which  promises  that  a  day  is 
coming  when  God  will  guide  people  with  His 
eye,  by  the  lights  and  the  shadows,  i.e.^  on  His 
answering  countenance. 

And  serious  men  to-day  no  longer  attempt  to 
disparage  these  delicate  and  poignant  distresses 
of  the  soul  by  recalling  the  rude  restraints  and 
penalties  of  primitive  societies.  They  rather 
perceive  that  this  necessity,  which  from  the 
beginning  was  acknowledged,  this  willingness  to 
accept  restraint  and  punishment,  bears  witness  to 
something  in  man  which  is  his  true  and  differen- 
tiating sign. 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     209 

And  now,  passing  by  many  matters  which, 
strictly  speaking,  intervene,  I  propose  to  bring 
before  our  minds  one  or  two  further  illustrations 
and  corroborations  from  the  more  serious  literature 
of  our  time  of  the  thesis  underlying  these  studies. 
That  thesis  I  might  state  in  some  such  words  as 
these  :  There  is  a  way  by  which  we  must  go,  and 
that  way  is,  on  the  whole,  the  way  by  which  we 
have  come. 

For  the  modern  period,  Goethe's  Faust  is 
perhaps  the  classical  illustration  of  a  man  setting 
out  to  test  the  findings  of  human  wisdom  in  the 
region  of  morals.  In  Faust  you  have  already 
those  principles  of  revolt  and  experiment  which 
reappear  in  much  of  our  contemporary  literature. 
In  Faust,  in  addition,  you  have  the  forecast  of 
what,  according  to  Goethe,  who  weighed  the 
matter  for  a  whole  lifetime,  is  sure  to  be  the 
outcome,  for  the  individual  and  for  society,  of  the 
application  of  those  principles. 

"  Let  me  have  him,"  said  Mephistopheles, 
•'and  I  pledge  me  he  will  eat  the  dust,  and  that 
with  joy."  Well,  eat  the  dust  he  did.  He 
marched  through  blood  and  rapine  to  the  satis- 
faction of  every  appetite.  But  never  with  joy, 
never  with  a  moment  of  solid  peace.  "  The  tiger 
14 


2IO  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

sleeps  when  he  has  devoured  his  prey,  but  a  man 
sleeps  not  after  he  has  sinned."  If  you  retort 
that,  on  the  contrary,  he  does  sleep,  we  must 
answer  with  all  great  literature  that,  in  that  case, 
he  is  not  truly  a  man. 

But  it  is  over  a  hundred  years  since  Faust 
was  written ;  and  it  may  very  well  be  that  every 
age  must  write  its  own  Faust^  as  every  man 
has,  in  fact  or  in  imagination,  to  enact  his  own 
Faust. 

There  are  three  works  of  the  imagination 
written  in  our  own  very  language  of  feeling,  and 
in  the  light  of  all  that  we  know  who  belong  to 
this  age.  I  shall  briefly  consider  them  from  the 
point  of  view  of  these  studies. 

I  am  thinking  of  Dostoievsky's  Crime  and 
Punishment ^  Tolstoy's  Resurrection,  and  Bernard 
Shaw's  The  Showing  Up  of  Blanco  Posnet. 

When  men  go  deeply  enough  into  the  human 
soul,  they  find  the  same  things  :  and  when  they 
go  still  more  deeply,  they  find  the  same  thing. 
That  final  thing  I  would  call  an  awful  loneliness 
and  sense  of  God.  But  not  to  anticipate.  Those 
three  works  are  three  determined  experiments  in 
living,  determined  adventures  into  the  region  of 
ultimate   things,  and   in   each   case,  I    hold,  the 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     211 

voyaging  soul  comes  upon  a  limit  and  barrier  in 
the  very  nature  of  things,  which  limit  and  barrier 
is — God.  Now,  in  saying  that  this  limit  and 
barrier  is  God  I  am  not  saying  something  which 
would  be  only  equal  to  saying  that  "X"  is  "X." 
I  mean  something  more  vital  and  constructive. 
I  mean  that  in  each  of  those  studies  of  the  soul  a 
man  in  his  passionate  progress  in  one  direction 
encounters  a  limit  and  barrier  which  simply  blocks 
his  way.  But  it  is  not  a  wooden  barrier,  or  a 
stone  wall :  nor  is  it  merely  a  precipice  beyond 
which  stretches  chaos  and  old  night.  He  is  met 
by  a  living  barrier,  by  something  which  has  the 
qualities  of  a  Person,  something  which  has  the 
effect  of  dealing  with  him  in  his  despair  and 
bankruptcy,  something  which  can  not  only  stop 
him  but  can  turn  him  back.  And  not  only  turn 
him  back,  as  one  might  come  back  sullenly  and 
heavily,  but  turn  him  back,  as  in  the  case  of 
Raskolnikov  and  Nekhludov,  with  a  strong  and 
sober  gratitude  to  God  for  the  moral  inexorable- 
ness  of  things  :  and  as  in  the  case  of  Blanco 
Posnet,  with  a  shining  countenance. 

In  Dostoievsky's  novel,  moral  nihilism  forms 
the  central  theme.  The  hero  of  the  story  is  a 
student   whom   all  kinds  of  unhappy  conditions 


212  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

have  made  miserable  and  tired  of  life.  In  this 
frame  of  mind  he  takes  up  an  attitude  of  revolt, 
not  merely  against  the  external  order,  such  as 
social  conventions,  rights  of  government,  and  the 
rest,  but  against  the  entire  conception  of  personal 
responsibility.  All  the  moral  judgments  and  feel- 
ings which  education  has  implanted  in  him  now 
seem  to  be  ridiculous  childish  prejudices,  con- 
temptible weakness,  to  emancipate  himself  from 
which  is  the  mark  of  a  free  and  strong  mind. 
Encouraged  by  such  reflections,  he  kills  an  old 
repulsive  usuress  in  order  to  obtain  money,  but,  at 
the  same  time  also,  to  test  his  own  theory,  to  test 
this  idea  which  for  a  long  time  he  had  been 
handling  and  accustoming  himself  to,  wearing 
down  his  own  scruples,  and  working  himself  up  to 
greater  and  greater  boldness — the  idea  that  one 
only  needed  to  be  strong  enough  and  hard  enough 
to  go  his  own  way  and  to  prosper.  **  I  wanted  to 
know,"  he  afterwards  says  in  discussing  the 
matter,  "whether  I  was  like  all  of  them,  merely 
vermin,  or  a  man ;  whether  I  was  able  to  break 
through  the  barriers,  or  not, — whether  I  would 
really  stoop  to  gain  power,  or  not ;  whether  I  was 
merely  a  trembling  creature,  or  whether  I  had  a 
right  ..."  and  so  on.     He  commits  the  crime. 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     213 

No  one  saw  him  strike  the  blow.  Besides,  she 
was  an  old  woman,  one  of  a  despised  race  too, 
and  plying  a  disreputable  trade.  And  these  were 
circumstances  which,  from  the  moment  after  his 
deed,  he  had  at  once  to  summon  to  his  aid,  to 
keep  back  the  first  tricklings  of  the  dark  flood  of 
reaction  and  remorse. 

But  he  never  has  an  hour's  quiet.  He  must 
talk.  He  must  talk  even  to  a  friend,  who  as  a 
detective  is  engaged  upon  the  case.  He  must 
set  out  again  and  again  to  see  that  detective 
friend,  to  talk  about  the  case.  The  police  fail. 
Raskolnikov  might  have  escaped — except  for 
himself  and  the  inveterate  demand  of  his  own 
spirit  that  he  shall  not  be  alone,  that  he  shall  talk, 
and,  talking,  shall  speak  about  the  things  that  are 
most  urgent  to  himself.  Speaking  about  these 
things,  he  cannot  hide  his  feelings,  until  at  last, 
noticing  how  it  gives  him  a  little  happiness  even 
to  speak  about  the  case,  and  a  little  more  happi- 
ness the  more  he  seems  to  implicate  himself,  he 
one  day  goes  the  whole  length,  and  first  betrays 
himself,  then  confesses  everything, — and  this  to 
an  accompaniment  of  moral  happiness  and  ease  so 
tumultuous  and  wonderful  that  he  feels  that  he 
had   never  lived  until  that  moment.     When  he 


214  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

confesses  his  guilt  to  his  friend  the  detective,  the 
detective  only  replies,  *'  I  knew  it  all  the  time. 
The  first  day  you  came  to  see  me,  after  the  crime, 
I  suspected  you.  When  you  began  to  speak  of 
it,  I  became  quite  sure.  I  didn't  lay  hands  upon 
you,  for  I  knew  that  you  were  one  of  those  who 
would  have  to  come  at  last !  " 

"When  I  kept  silent,"  says  someone  in  the 
32nd  Psalm,  "my  bones  waxed  old  through 
my  roaring  all  the  day  long.  For  day  and 
night  Thy  hand  was  heavy  upon  me.  My  mois- 
ture was  turned  into  the  drought  of  summer. 
I  acknowledged  my  sin  unto  Thee,  and  mine 
iniquity  I  did  not  hide.  ...  I  said.  Thou  art 
my  hiding-place."  So  speaks  a  man  to  the 
mysterious  One  who  haunts  him  in  the  deep 
places  of  moral  solitude. 

There  is  another  voice  from  a  psalm  which 
I  recall  :  "  These  things  thou  hast  done  and 
I  kept  silence.  Thou  thoughtest  that  I  was 
altogether  such  an  one  as  thyself.  But  I  will 
reprove  thee,  and  set  them  in  order  before  thine 
eyes." 

And  all  great  literature  seems  to  have  as  its 
burden  just  this,  that  such  beings  we  are,  and  in 
the  hand  of  such  an  One. 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     215 

In  the  last  of  his  greater  works  Tolstoy  has 
advanced,  for  those  who  did  not  acknowledge  the 
teaching  of  the  New  Testament,  the  moral 
demand  which  the  human  soul  must  henceforth 
make  of  all  who  would  live  honourably  and  at 
peace  with  themselves.  I  do  not  say  that  he 
was  the  first  to  proclaim  our  duty  to  make  re- 
paration to  everyone  whom  we  have  wronged. 
Tolstoy  was  not  the  first  to  say  that.  It  was  the 
greatness  of  Tolstoy  that  he  was  not  the  first  to 
say  anything.  Anything  that  is  said  for  the  first 
time  might  as  well  not  have  been  said.  It  is 
quite  certainly  either  not  true  or  of  no  real 
importance.  But  it  is  Tolstoy's  greatness,  in  that 
late  work  of  his,  to  have  recalled,  with  a  fidelity 
to  the  facts  of  our  conscience  which  is  almost 
intolerably  true,  the  instinct  of  the  soul  of  man, 
aroused  at  length,  and  indignant  at  itself,  and 
full  of  revenge  upon  itself, — the  instinct  of  man 
to  regard  himself  as  no  longer  belonging  to  him- 
self, but  to  that  one,  if  there  be  such  an  one, 
whom  he  has  pre-eminently  wronged. 

There  is  no  doubt  whatever  that  if  confession 
ceases  to  be  in  some  sense  public,  it  is  apt  to  lose 
its  cleansing  quality.  If  we  say  "it  is  enough 
that  we  confess  to  God  in  secret,"  the  answer  is, 


2l6  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

that  it  is  not  enough,  and  was  never  regarded  as 
enough  by  finer  souls.  Besides,  it  is  a  bad  sign 
when  we  take  our  religion  on  its  lowest  terms. 
It  is  a  bad  sign  when  we  wish  to  get  clear  of  an 
offence  with  the  least  measure  of  sacrifice.  We 
may,  indeed,  get  off,  but  we  simply  get  off.  We 
are  fixed  there.     We  stand  still. 

Again,  when  we  say,  defending  ourselves,  that 
we  are  taking  the  easier  way,  we  musf  remember 
that  in  morals  the  easier  way  is  never  the  higher 
way.  Besides,  if  we  will  but  attend  to  the  voice 
of  our  own  soul  in  the  hour  when  we  confess  our- 
selves to  God,  when  we  smooth  out  our  secret 
life  to  the  judgment  of  the  Highest,  we  shall  find 
that  our  conscience  is  not  yet  appeased.  We 
shall  hear  an  instruction  from  Him  who  is  behind 
everything,  commanding  us,  were  it  only  to  prove 
our  sincerity,  to  go  out  and  find  him  or  her  whom 
we  have  wronged. 

"If  thou  art  offering  thy  gift  at  the  altar,"  said 
Jesus,  "and  there  rememberest  that  thy  brother 
hath  aught  against  thee,  leave  there  thy  gift 
before  the  altar,  and  go  thy  way :  first  be  re- 
conciled to  thy  brother,  and  then  come  and  offer 
thy  gift." 

It  is  when  we  recall  the  severity  of  such  words 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     217 

— and,  far  from  standing  alone,  they  arise  out  of 
the  whole  message  of  the  New  Testament — that 
we  wonder  again  how  an  entire  ethical  system 
should  have  arisen  in  our  day  based  upon  the 
idea  that  the  ethics  of  Jesus  are  too  soft  and  easy. 
This,  though  Jesus  said  more  than  once  that 
there  were  circumstances  in  which  a  man  might 
find  himself  when  it  would  be  as  hard  to  follow 
Him  as  it  would  be  for  one  to  cut  off  his  right 
hand  with  his  left. 

Prince  Nekhludov  was  summoned  to  act  upon 
a  jury.  It  was  his  turn.  That  is  to  say,  it  was 
one  of  those  apparently  casual  things  which,  as 
we  get  older,  we  begin  to  suspect  as  having  God 
very  emphatically  behind  them.  A  prisoner  was 
brought  in,  charged  with  murder,  and  this  in 
circumstances  of  the  utmost  degradation.  In  a 
moment,  as  the  Bible  once  again  puts  it  (and  if 
you  know  the  Bible,  you  simply  cannot  keep  it 
out  of  any  deep  consideration  of  life),  in  a 
moment  "  a  dart  struck  through  his  liver."  It  is 
Maslova,  an  orphan,  at  one  time  a  sweet,  warm- 
hearted girl,  who  had  acted  as  a  kind  of  com- 
panion to  Nekhludov's  aunts.  And  it  was  he, 
Nekhludov,  who  had  led  Maslova  out  upon  her 
disastrous  way  and  had  set  her  face  towards  hell. 


21 8  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

Maslova  is  condemned,  though  innocent  of  the 
crime,  and  is  banished  to  Siberia.     And  Nekhlu- 
dov  accompanies  her.     A  prince,  a  great  landlord, 
a  soldier,  sought  after  by  society,  and  Maslova, 
one   whom  he   might   have  dismissed   from   his 
mind, — if  what  so  many  in  our  day  say  about  the 
human  soul  were  the  whole  truth!     Nekhludov 
does  not  hesitate  even  for  a  moment.     Maslova 
has  never  reproached  him.     Even  when  it  comes 
home  to  her  that  he  is  unhappy,  and  when  she 
understands,  first  dimly,  but  at  last  quite  clearly, 
that  in  his  own  feeling  and  belief  Nekhludov  can 
never  be  at  peace  until  she,  Maslova,  has  forgiven 
him,   and   even  then  that   he   can   never   be   at 
peace,  she  tries  to  put  him  off  his  own  terrible 
seriousness,    even   saying   that    for   herself  it  is 
nothing,  and  that  as  for  him,  he  is  a  prince,  and 
besides,  she  had  loved  him  in  that  far-off  time. 
But  Nekhludov  has  seen  his  way,  and  for  him 
there  is  no  other.     Henceforward,  and  until  God 
shall    release   the   one   or    the   other   from   this 
present  world,  and  even  thereafter  in  the  other 
world,  as  in  Dante's  heart-shaking  story  of  Paolo 
and  Francesca,  these  two  must  share  each  other  s 
thoughts,  each  other's  life,  and  every  day  and  at 
the  last  must  stand  before  God  hand  in  hand. 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     219 

This  is  what  I  meant  when  I  said  that  it  had 
been  given  to  Tolstoy  to  recall  man  to  that 
demand  which  conscience  makes  upon  us,  not 
simply  that  we  shall  confess  our  sin,  thereby 
separating  ourselves  from  it,  but  that  we  shall 
make  all  possible  reparation.  If  there  live  in  the 
world  one  whom  we  have  wronged,  that  one 
alone  has  the  power  to  shut  us  out  from  heaven. 
Or  rather,  let  me  say,  if  God  should  forgive  us 
our  sin,  it  will  be  our  first,  and,  until  it  is  granted, 
our  only  petition,  that  we  be  given  some  task  of 
prostrate  love  towards  that  one  whom  we,  either 
in  ignorance  or  with  a  high  hand,  caused  to 
offend. 

Speaking  for  myself,  the  terrible  moral  reality 
of  Tolstoy  makes  even  the  Confessions  of  St. 
Augustine  sound  far  short  of  what  is  possible  to 
the  soul  of  man  in  the  region  of  moral  grief. 

And  now  I  come  to  a  play  of  Bernard  Shaw's, 
in  which  we  find  the  soul  of  a  man  behaving  in 
precisely  the  same  way  as  in  those  two  over- 
whelming stories. 

The  scene  of  the  short  drama  is  laid  in  the  far 
west  of  America, — in  the  midst  of  a  wild  and 
coarse-living  community. 


220  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

Blanco  Posnet  has  stolen  a  horse,  and  is  now 
standing  his  trial  in  a  rough-and-ready  court,  the 
sheriff  and  jury  being  men  as  wild  and  un- 
scrupulous as  himself.  Though  Posnet  has  been 
caught,  and  there  is  no  doubt  whatever  of  his 
guilt,  still  it  is  difficult  to  bring  the  crime  home 
to  him  :  for  when  he  was  apprehended  he  was 
walking  on  foot,  the  horse  nowhere  to  be  seen. 
A  witness  is  pressed  to  give  false  evidence 
against  him.  She  has  no  difficulty.  Blanco 
Posnet  behaves  all  through  with  an  excitement 
and  intoxication  which  we  do  not  quite  under- 
stand until  later.  He  breaks  out  into  snatches 
of  a  hymn,  which  he  allows  them  to  suppose  is 
pure  blasphemy, — as  the  censor  who  interdicted 
the  play  evidently  considered  it  to  be.  And  yet 
it  is  not  pure  blasphemy.  In  a  moment  of  some- 
thing like  tenderness  Posnet  speaks  about  a 
woman  and  a  child,  but  so  indistinctly  that  his 
hearers  can  make  nothing  of  it.  He  keeps 
saying:  "They  were  not  real,"  and  "I  see  her 
whene-.er  I  look  up."  The  sheriff  and  jury  are 
getting  tired,  and  about  to  execute  judgment, 
when  there  is  a  stir  at  the  door,  which  presently 
opens.  A  woman  enters,  pale  and  hurried ; 
whereupon  Posnet  appeals  to   the   court  not  to 


I 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     221 

listen  to  a  word  she  says ;  that  she  is  not  real, 
and  that  it  is  she  whom  he  sees  whenever  he 
looks  up. 

But  the  woman  speaks,  and  we  learn  the  whole 
truth,  the  beautiful  and  even  holy  truth.  This 
is  what  had  happened.  Blanco  Posnet,  riding 
off  on  the  stolen  horse,  had  been  stopped  on  the 
way  by  a  woman,  this  woman,  who  at  the  time 
was  carrying  a  little  child.  She  besought  Posnet 
to  lend  her  his  horse  that  she  might  ride  to  the 
nearest  doctor  with  her  child.  For  the  child 
was  in  the  grip  of  a  kind  of  croup.  At  first 
Posnet  spurns  her.  Why  should  he,  why  should 
any  man,  especially  in  this  twentieth  century, 
when  so  many  books  have  been  written  to  prove 
that  such  a  thing  is  absurd,  weak,  unworthy  of 
the  Nietzschean  "blonde  beast"  which  is  sup- 
posed to  exhaust  the  qualities  of  human  nature, 
why  should  he  be  interrupted,  brought  to  a 
standstill,  be  made  tender,  be  converted,  in  fact, 
by  this  plea  of  a  woman  ?  And  so  he  tries  to 
push  on.  But  the  woman,  with  the  ingenuity  of 
love  and  of  despair,  lifts  up  the  child  to  the  man's 
neck,  and  Blanco  Posnet  feels  the  little  fingers 
playing  behind  his  ears,  and  in  his  hair.  And 
with    that,   something    melted,  something    went 


22  2  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

soft.  He  let  the  woman  and  child  ride  off  with 
the  horse,  and  he  came  back  to  be  hanged. 
And,  to  the  confusion  of  all  those  moderns  who 
think  that  the  fashion  in  morals  of  a  decadent 
minority  can  withstand  the  ancestral  voices  of 
the  soul,  Blanco  Posnet  is  not  ashamed  of  what 
he  has  done.  Looking  round  upon  that  court  of 
wild  men  and  women,  he  sees  that,  like  himself,  the 
very  telling  of  the  story  has  made  them  all  go  soft. 
**  Gosh,  when  I  think  that  I  might  have  been 
safe,  and  fifty  miles  away  by  now,  with  that 
horse ;  and  here  I  am  waiting  to  be  hung  up  and 
filled  with  lead !  What  came  to  me  .-*  What 
made  me  such  a  fool  ?  That's  what  I  want  to 
know.  That's  the  great  secret.  ...  It  wasn't 
a  man.  .  .  .  He  done  me  out  of  it.  .  .  .  He 
means  to  win  the  deal  and  you  can't  stop 
Him.  .  .  .  Boys,  I'm  going  to  preach  you  a 
sermon  on  the  moral  of  this  day's  proceedings.  .  .  . 
I  started  in  to  be  a  bad  man  like  the  rest  of 
you.  ...  I  took  the  broad  path  because  I 
thought  I  was  a  man  and  not  a  snivelling,  canting, 
turning-the-other-cheek  apprentice  angel  serving 
his  time  in  a  vale  of  tears.  .  .  .  Why  did  the 
child  die?  Tell  me  that  if  you  can.  He  can't 
have   wanted   to   kill   the   child.     Why   did    He 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     223 

make  me  go  soft  on  the  child,  if  He  was  going 
hard  on  it  Himself?  Why  should  He  go  hard 
on  the  innocent  kid  and  go  soft  on  a  rotten  thing 
like  me?  Why  did  I  go  soft  myself?  Why  did 
the  Sheriff  go  soft  ?  Why  did  Feemy  go  soft  ? 
What's  this  game  that  upsets  our  game  ?  For 
seems  to  me  there's  two  games  bein'  played. 
Our  game  is  a  rotten  game  that  makes  me  feel 
I'm  dirt,  and  that  you're  all  rotten  dirt  as  me. 
T'other  game  may  be  a  silly  game ;  but  it  ain't 
rotten.  When  the  Sheriff  played  it,  he  stopped 
being  rotten.  When  Feemy  played  it,  the  paint 
nearly  dropped  off  her  face.  When  I  pi  lyed  it, 
I  cursed  myself  for  a  fool,  but  I  lost  the  rotten 
feel  all  the  same.  .  .  .  What  about  the  croup? 
It  was  early  days  when  He  made  the  croup,  I 
guess.  It  was  the  best  He  could  think  of  then ; 
but  when  it  turned  out  wrong  in  His  hands.  He 
made  you  and  me  to  fight  the  croup  for  Him. 
You  bet  He  didn't  make  us  for  nothing,  and  He 
wouldn't  have  made  us  at  all  if  He  could  have 
done  His  work  without  us.  By  Gum,  that  must 
be  what  we're  for!  .  .  .  He  made  me  because 
He  had  a  job  for  me.  He  let  me  run  loose  till 
the  job  was  ready,  and  then  I  had  to  come  along 
and  do  it,  hanging  or  no  hanging.     And   I  tell 


224  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

you,  it  didn't  feel  rotten :  it  felt  bully,  just  bully. 
Anyhow,  I  got  the  rotten  feel  off  me  for  a  minute 
of  my  life;  and  I'll  go  through  fire  to  put  it  off 
me  again.  .  .  .  There's  no  good  and  bad  .  .  . 
but,  by  Jiminy,  gents,  there's  a  rotten  game  and 
there's  a  great  game.  I  played  the  rotten  game ; 
but  the  great  game  was  played  on  me ;  and  now 
I'm  for  the  great  game  every  time.     Amen." 

Not  a  word  more  shall  I  say.  There  is  nothing 
more  to  be  said. 

"When  I  think  that  I  might  have  been  safe, 
and  fift  J  miles  away  by  now,  with  that  horse ; 
and  hei  e  I  am  waiting  to  be  hung  up  and  filled 
with  le.-  id !  What  came  to  me  ?  What  made  me 
such  a  fool.-*  That's  what  I  want  to  know. 
That's  the  great  secret." 

That  indeed  is  the  secret.  I  hold  that  it  is  an 
open  secret.     I  leave  my  case  at  that. 

V.  Here  and  There 

The  objection  may  be  taken  to  these  studies  that 
we  are  dealing  with  rare  and  unusual  personalities ; 
that  therefore  the  inferences  which  we  deduce 
from  their  behaviour  in  extremis  are  good  only  for 
them  and  are  not  authoritative  for  average  human 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     225 

beings.  Well,  there  are  many  things  to  be 
said  by  way  of  answer  or  qualification  to  such  a 
criticism.  For  example,  it  is  surely  a  presump- 
tion in  favour  of  the  universality  which  is  claimed 
for  these  tragic  moods  and  protests,  that  they 
awaken  a  response  in  the  souls  of  those  who 
choose  to  come  within  hearing  of  them,  and  that 
when  men  are  reduced  by  life  to  some  constraint 
or  fear,  the  language  of  great  literature  becomes 
their  own  natural  speech.  It  is  not  claimed  that 
all  men  dwell  habitually  among  those  deep  things. 
It  is  not  claimed  even  that  all  men  have  had 
experience  of  those  deep  things.  What  is  claimed 
is  that  those  deep  things  are  there  ;  that  the  soul 
of  man  is  capable  of  and  liable  to  the  vision  of 
those  depths ;  and  that  whenever  the  soul  has 
been  thrown  back  upon  itself,  and  shut  in  with 
itself,  there  are  certain  persistent  fears  which 
present  themselves,  and  a  certain  course  which 
offers  itself  as  the  only  possible  way  of  peace. 

The  deeper  literature  of  the  soul,  with  a 
unanimousness  which  makes  it  authoritative  for 
many  of  us,  and  ought  to  make  it  worthy  of 
con  .ideration  by  all  responsible  people  (the  deeper 
literature  of  the  soul),  has  given  a  name  and  body 
to  those  intangible  things. 
15 


226  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

To  say  that  there  are  many  who  have  never 
had  such  feelings  is  simply  to  say  that  their  great 
day, — that  day  on  earth  wherein  the  soul  rehearses 
what  its  behaviour  shall  be  before  the  Great  White 
Throne, — their  great  day  has  not  yet  come.  Or 
it  may  only  mean  that  they  have  so  far  succeeded 
in  escaping  from  any  season  of  loneliness  long 
enough  and  acute  enough  to  bring  out  those 
lurking  shapes. 

Certainly  it  is  no  news  to  those  of  us  who  are 
acquainted  with  that  great  body  of  the  literature 
of  the  soul,  the  Bible,  to  be  told  that  all  men  have 
not  these  tremors  and  disquietudes.  "All  men 
have  not  faith,"  said  St  Paul,  meaning,  when  he 
wrote  the  words,  this  very  thing,  that  all  men  have 
not  this  moral  tenderness  which  keeps  us  soft 
towards  God.  Plato  also  discriminates  between 
**  royal "  natures,  as  he  calls  them,  natures,  that  is 
to  say,  which  are  liable  to  waves  of  contrition, 
and  natures  of  another  kind  which,  so  far  as  we 
see, — but  then  in  these  matters  we  do  not  see 
very  far,  and  can  only  see  for  ourselves, — live  on 
without  ever  coming  to  a  day  of  reckoning  with 
themselves. 

In  our  own  day,  William  James  of  Harvard 
divided  all  souls  into  two  classes, — souls  which, 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     227 

with  a  measure  of  predestination,  are  tough,  and 
souls  which,  by  an  equal  necessity,  are  tender. 

It  is  another  aspect  of  the  greatness  of  Jesus 
that  in  His  view  the  human  soul  in  its  final  in- 
stincts and  necessities  is  one,  however  certain 
features  may  have  been  heightened  or  depressed. 
He  believed  that  the  true  and  final  nature  of  the 
soul  is  to  seek,  and  having  found,  to  dwell  in 
communion  with,  Him  whom  He  called  "the 
Father."  He  believed  that  if  the  Father  were 
brought  to  the  heart  of  man,  as  He  by  His  own 
unstinted  life  of  love  was  bringing  Him,  the  heart 
of  man  in  every  instance  would  respond.  Not 
easily  indeed.  With  great  difficulty  and  labour 
rather,  as  happens  at  every  new  birth. 

But  this  He  did  believe,  and  in  this  faith  He 
gave  Himself  without  reserve,  that  there  was  and 
is  in  every  human  being  the  capacity  for  seeing 
something  higher  than  its  own  reach  at  any 
moment,  and  that,  when  the  human  spirit  becomes 
aware  of  that  Presence  of  God  knocking  and 
waiting  at  its  own  very  door,  there  and  then 
begins  a  controversy  between  impulses  which, 
whatever  be  the  issue,  makes  the  man  morally 
self-conscious  and  a  party  to  his  own  fate. 

Whether  or  not  all  men  are  ultimately  liable  to 


228  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

the  miseries  which  follow  wrong-doing,  or  to  the 
shame  and  sorrow  which  afflict  souls  of  a  certain 
kind  when  they  see  themselves  in  the  light  of 
some  holier  way,  is  a  matter  so  serious  that  it  is 
wiser  not  to  dogmatise  upon  it.  It  must  be  left 
to  ourselves  one  by  one  to  say  whether  we  have 
such  feelings,  or  do  not  have  them.  It  may  be 
that  once  upon  a  time  we  did  have  them.  But 
they  do  not  trouble  us  now.  In  that  case,  we 
ought  to  ask  ourselves  whether  we  dealt  honour- 
ably by  them  when  they  visited  us,  or  whether 
we  tampered  with  the  delicate  mechanism  of  our 
spiritual  life  and  trampled  down  the  secret  barriers 
of  God. 

Once  again  it  may  be  said  that  all  this  agonis- 
ing over  one's  ways  has  lost  its  reason  and 
foundation  by  the  work,  in  various  fields,  of  the 
scientific  method.  If  moral  grief  appears  to-day 
in  literature  or  in  life,  it  is  a  reminiscence  from 
pre-scientific  times.  In  short,  to  recall  the  phrase 
with  which  these  studies  began — "  no  one  to-day 
is  worrying  about  his  sins."  Well  now,  let  me  say 
one  or  two  things  just  there. 

It  is  probably  quite  true  that  in  our  day  the 
sense  of  sin  is  much  fainter  than  it  has  been  ;  for 
the  sense  of  God  may  not  be  so  strong  as  it  has 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     229 

been.  The  sense  of  sin  is  the  shadow  of  the  sense 
of  God ;  and  a  dim  light  casts  no  shadow.  It  is 
the  bright  shining  of  a  light  which  discovers  us  to 
ourselves.  It  is  inevitable  that  in  a  society  which 
is  without  moral  seriousness,  the  individual,  if  he 
does  not  summon  himself  each  day  before  a  higher 
court,  will  come  more  and  more  into  equilibrium 
with  his  surroundings.  But  this  is  not  to  say  that 
he  has  lost  the  power  to  feel  the  misery  of  his  own 
way,  if  the  higher  way  should  be  revealed  to  him. 
And  besides,  populous  and  confusing  as  is  the 
general  life  in  these  days,  one's  soul  is  always 
distinct  to  itself  and  keeps  urging  its  own  business 
upon  each  one's  attention.  It  is  true  that  there 
are  many  ways  by  which  we  may  for  a  time 
escape  from  ourselves.  We  may  even  train  our 
mind  to  an  extraordinary  pitch  of  ingenuity  for 
escaping  seriousness.  And  yet  all  the  time  we 
know  that  we  are  merely  evading  something,  we 
know  that  we  are  living  by  our  wits.  It  is  not 
without  significance  that  the  best-known  poem 
of  Francis  Thompson  should  be  "  The  Hound  of 
Heaven."  It  but  shows  that  there  the  poet  had 
revealed  the  thoughts  of  many  hearts. 

So  long  as   a   man   believes   himself,    he   will 
believe  in  the  unhappiness  of  wrong-doing,  and  he 


2  30  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

will  know  precisely  wherein  for  him  wrong-doing 
consists.  It  is  when  we  cease  to  believe  ourselves, 
and  begin  to  believe  other  people ;  it  is  when  we 
take  our  eyes  off  our  own  case  and  let  them 
wander  carelessly  upon  the  general  life  ;  it  is  when 
we  say,  "Why  should  I  trouble  myself,  in  this 
busy  city  where  the  crowds  are  passing  to  and  fro, 
and  where  other  people  are  not  troubling  them- 
selves ?  " — it  is  then  and  thus  that  we  escape  the 
very  issue  which  bears  witness  to  our  moral  worth 
in  the  world.  Now  the  fact  is  that  those  crowds 
who  help  us  to  get  over  our  own  scruples  are  made 
up  of  individuals  like  ourselves,  who,  so  far  as  we 
know,  are  doing  precisely  what  we  are  doing, 
avoiding  the  challenge  of  some  personal  question 
by  looking  out  upon  what  seems  the  fashion 
or  custom.  So  long  as  we  keep  our  eyes  upon 
ourselves  we  feel  we  must  decide  something, 
whereas  when  we  look  away  from  ourselves  and 
begin  to  speak  about  the  spirit  of  the  time,  about 
progress,  about  enlightenment  and  so  forth,  we 
begin  to  feel  that  everything  has  already  been 
decided,  and  decided  in  a  way  that  falls  in  very 
happily  with  our  own  inclination. 

But  once  again  it  is  simply  not  true,  if  one  may 
judge   from   the  best  writing  of  our  own  time, 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     231 

that  man  has  found  a  formula  for  the  silencing 
of  those  ancient  voices  of  the  soul.  Book  after 
book  has  appeared  in  our  day,  where  one  might 
even  say  the  author  has  tried  to  prove  a  case 
against  the  established  moral  habit  and  prejudice. 
He  has  launched  a  human  being  out  upon  life  on 
some  principle  which  is  against  the  social  tradi- 
tion. And  yet  I  know  of  no  single  case  where 
the  end  is  not  bitterness.  I  know  of  no  case  in 
any  piece  of  serious  literature  where  a  person, 
or  persons,  who  flout  the  accepted  morality  in 
fundamental  things,  gain  happiness :  I  mean,  of 
course,  such  a  happiness  as  they  themselves  can 
bear  to  think  about  and  to  look  back  upon. 
You  may  say,  indeed,  that  the  reason  for  this 
is,  that  society  itself  is  so  constituted,  so  hide- 
bound by  conventionality,  so  timid,  so  insincere 
and  hypocritical,  that  souls  who  will  be  free  must 
suffer.  But  that  is  not  my  point.  That  men 
suffer  at  the  hands  of  society  is,  of  course,  no 
proof  that  they  are  wrong.  It  may  be  proof 
that  society  is  wrong.  It  is  true  likewise  that 
it  will  only  be  by  the  faithful  endurance  of  suffer- 
ing at  the  hand  of  society  that  society  itself  will 
be  renewed.  It  would  be  no  disparagement  of 
a  life's  principles  that  they  nailed  a  man  to  a 


23^  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

cross;  but  it  is  a  disparagement  of  a  life's 
principles  that  they  lead  on  to  private  misery, 
that  they  provoke  an  invincible  reaction  towards 
shame  and  bitterness.  And  that  is  what  I  find 
in  every  sincere  piece  of  writing  in  which  the 
dice  are  not  loaded,  in  which,  I  mean  to  say, 
the  writer  obeys  with  fidelity  the  logic  of  his 
own  imagination.  The  thing  in  the  long  run 
does  not  work.  Not  only  does  it  not  work,  and 
will  it  not  work,  on  the  large  scale  as  a  social 
habit ;  it  does  not  work  in  the  kingdom  of  a 
man's  own  spirit.  If  you  still  protest  that  this 
liability  to  remorse,  this  tendency  of  self-seeking 
to  leave  the  taste  of  ashes  in  the  mouth,  is  simply 
the  reminiscence  in  our  blood  of  barbarous  and 
hideous  social  retributions  before  these  days  of 
enlightenment,  once  again  you  leave  the  real 
issue  untouched.  For  human  nature  is  just  that 
thing  which  has  come  down  through  history 
bearing  within  itself  those  profound  and  terrible 
susceptibilities. 

But  it  is  not  enough  to  say  that  this  misery 
which  free  spirits  cannot  escape  is  the  reminis- 
cence of  the  social  penalties  of  earlier  times,  or 
that  it  is  the  effect  of  the  attitude  of  society 
to-day  towards  one  who  violates  its  conventions. 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     233 

Society  has  not  the  power  to  cause  moral  misery. 
Society  has  the  power  to  inflict  penalty ;  society 
has  not  the  power  to  make  one  ashamed  of  him- 
self. There  is  a  quality  of  misery  which  I  alone 
can  bring  upon  myself,  and  it  arises  when  at 
length  I  have  come  within  sight  of  a  way  of 
living  which  makes  the  way  I  have  come  seem 
unworthy,  or  cruel,  or  sensual,  in  any  case 
intolerable. 

So  long  as  my  own  heart  does  not  reproach 
me,  so  long  as,  in  the  fine  speech  of  the  Bible, 
I  can  lift  up  my  face  to  God  without  spot,  I 
may  suffer,  I  may  be  forsaken,  but,  deeper  than 
everything,  I  ought  to  be  at  peace,  my  heart 
should  be  free  of  even  one  drop  of  bitterness. 
I  ought,  indeed,  to  be  contemptuous  of  a  society 
or  of  a  generation  which  is  so  blind  as  not  to 
see  the  glory  of  the  way  which  I  have  chosen. 
Suffering,  indeed,  is  no  proof  that  a  man's  life- 
principles  are  at  fault ;  the  society  which  inflicts 
the  suffering,  or  stands  by  while  it  is  being 
endured,  may  be  at  fault.  In  such  a  case,  the 
man's  life-principles,  though  they  are  opposed 
to  the  principles  of  his  day,  may  all  the  time 
be  in  harmony  with  the  principles  of  a  day  that 
is   coming.     But   misery,   the  taste   of  ashes  in 


234  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

the  mouth,  personal  shame,  the  sense  of  world- 
weariness,  these,  when  they  follow  upon  some 
way  of  life,  and  when  they  arise  in  the  human 
heart  out  of  some  way  of  life,  do  demonstrate 
that  that  way  of  life  is  contrary  to  the  man's 
own  true  nature  and  spirit.  For  a  way  of  life 
which  destroys  the  very  principles  of  human 
nature  cannot  be  according  to  the  nature  of 
things. 

"  And  so,"  I  said,  "  Good-bye  to  London ! "  We  said  no 
more,  but  watched  the  South-side  streets  below — bright 
gleams  of  light  and  movement,  and  the  dark,  dim,  monstrous 
shapes  of  houses  and  factories.  We  ran  through  Waterloo 
Station,  London  Bridge,  New  Cross,  St.  John's.  We  never 
said  a  word.  It  seemed  to  me  that  for  a  time  we  had 
exhausted  our  emotions.  We  had  escaped,  we  had  cut  our 
knot,  we  had  accepted  the  penalty.  That  was  all  settled. 
That  harvest  of  feelings  we  had  reaped.  I  thought  now 
only  of  London,  of  London  as  the  symbol  of  all  we  were 
leaving  and  all  we  had  lost  in  the  world.  I  felt  nothing 
now  but  an  enormous  and  overwhelming  regret.  .  .  .  Then 
suddenly,  stabbing  me  to  the  heart,  came  a  vision  of 
Margaret's  tears  and  the  sound  of  her  voice  ...  I  came 
out  of  a  cloud  of  thoughts  to  discover  the  narrow  compart- 
ment with  its  feeble  lamp  overhead,  and  our  rugs  and  hand- 
baggage  swaying  on  the  rack,  and  Isabel,  very  still  in  front 
of  me,  gripping  some  wilting  red  roses  tightly  in  her  bare 
and  ringless  hand. 

For  a  moment  I  could  not  understand  her  attitude,  and 
then  I  perceived  she  was  sitting  bent  together  with  her  head 
averted  from  the  light  to  hide  the  tears  that  were  streaming 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     235 

down  her  face.  She  had  not  got  her  handkerchief  out  for 
fear  I  should  see  this,  but  I  saw  her  tears,  dark  drops  of  tears 
upon  her  sleeve. 

For  a  time  I  stared  at  her  and  was  motionless  in  a  sort 
of  still  and  weary  amazement.  Why  had  we  done  this 
injury  to  one  another?  Why?  Then  something  stirred 
within  me. 

"  Isabel,"  I  whispered. 

She  made  no  sign. 

"  Isabel ! "  I  repeated,  and  then  crossed  over  to  her,  crept 
closely  to  her,  put  my  arm  about  her,  and  drew  her  wet 
cheek  to  mine. 


So  ends  a  great  modern  story.  But  surely 
this  sad  way  is  the  wrong  way.  It  is  not  that 
they  are  suffering  which  proves  that  they  are 
wrong.  Their  chief  suffering  is  that  they  know 
that  they  are  wrong. 

"Sail  in  there,"  cried  an  old  admiral,  when 
the  fight  had  gone  against  him,  "  sail  in  there ; 
for  I  have  taken  the  soundings,  and  when  they 
sink  my  ship,  the  flag  at  the  mast-head  will  still 
be  flying."  That  is  the  language  of  a  man  whose 
heart  is  with  him  in  the  deep  waters.  But  "wet 
cheeks,  silence,  wilting  red  roses" — these  are 
signs  that  their  own  heart  has  gone  out  of  the 
business. 

The  last  thing  about  us  is  that  we  are  not 
alone.     When    we   look   long   and   deeply   into 


236  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

ourselves,  we  perceive  that  we  stand  for  ever 
in  a  relation  to  Another,  to  an  Absolute  and 
close-fitting  Personality.  We  can  no  more  think 
of  ourselves  as  quite  alone  and  independent  than 
we  can  think  of  space  except  as  being  surrounded 
by  space,  and  of  time  except  as  surrounded  by 
time.  Whatever  may  be  the  truth  in  regard 
to  other  races,  it  is  true  with  regard  to  us,  that 
the  only  God  with  whom  we  have  to  do  is  the 
God  of  our  fathers.  We  can  free  ourselves  from 
the  bondage  of  one  aspect  of  His  nature  only 
by  appealing  to  another  aspect,  which  we  claim 
as  belonging  still  more  properly  to  Him,  more 
central  and  abiding. 

I  do  not  know  how  better  to  describe  the 
private  misery  which,  on  the  witness  of  all  great 
literature,  has  been  let  loose  in  men's  hearts  by 
certain  ways  than  to  say,  that  it  is  the  experience 
by  us  of  an  intolerable  loneliness.  We  can  all 
of  us  endure  loneliness  in  one  region  of  our  life, 
so  long  as  we  are  sustained  by  friendliness  and 
belief  in  us,  in  another  region  deeper  and  more 
intimate.  We  can  bear  to  be  misunderstood  by 
those  who  do  not  know  us,  so  long  as  we  are 
supported  by  the  love,  or,  if  need  be,  by  the 
patience  of  those  who  know  us  to  some  depth. 


SENSE  OF  SIN  IN  GREAT  LITERATURE     237 

And  even  when  friends  forsake  us,  when  the 
one  or  two  on  whom  we  leaned  fall  away,  if  we 
can  still  without  conscious  self-deception  send 
our  soul  more  deeply  into  itself  and  there  find 
comfort  and  no  embarrassment ;  if,  to  use 
language  concerning  matters  about  which 
language  fails,  we  can  look  across  the  frontier 
of  our  own  personality  and  truly  believe  that 
we  are  not  outcasts  or  outlaws  from  the  Kingdom 
of  God, — we  may  suffer,  we  will  suffer,  but  we 
have  not  failed,  and  we  are  not  unhappy.  The 
Spirit  beareth  witness  with  our  spirit  that  we 
are  sons  of  God.  But,  if  it  is  otherwise  with 
us,  if  when  we  descend  into  ourselves  for  solace 
we  find  none ;  if,  when  we  would  lean  upon  our 
last  Resource  and  make  our  protest  from  the 
judgment  of  the  world  to  Him  who  knows  every- 
thing, if  there  and  then  we  are  alone ;  if  the 
Face  we  plead  with  seems  to  be  turned  away 
from  us, — we  have  come,  I  think,  upon  that 
final  silence  and  disapproval  from  which  there 
is  no  appeal. 

This  was  an  idea  which  more  than  once  our 
Lord  dwelt  upon.  In  some  of  His  gravest  words 
He  warned  men  that  the  penalty  for  certain 
courses   was   not   the  pain  which  they  entailed 


238  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

The  true  penalty  was — the  consequence,  and 
that  consequence  was  that  one  day  they  should 
be  left  out  of  something.  It  might  be  the  society 
of  men.  It  might  be  the  friendship  of  those  who 
had  been  dear  to  them.  It  might  even  be  the 
Fellowship  of  God. 

And  the  great  cries  of  the  soul  in  literature 
and  in  life  are  the  cries  of  those  who  are  afraid 
of  that  loneliness,  or  who  already  are  tasting  the 
bitterness  of  it. 


VII 

IS  HISTORY  REPEATING  ITSELF  ?—"  JULIAN 
THE  APOSTATE" 

A  Parallel 

I  BE  LI  EVE  that  when  we  get  far  enough  away 
from  the  present  terrible  state  of  things  to 
reflect  upon  how  it  all  came  about,  we  shall 
perceive  that  what  we  witnessed  was  a  deliberate 
attempt  to  find  a  basis  other  than  the  traditional 
Christian  basis  for  human  life,  and  the  difficult 
overthrow  of  that  attempt.  Certainly  it  was  as 
I  was  reading  the  terrifying  political  literature  of 
modern  Germany,  its  Bernhardi,  and  Treitschke, 
and,  earlier  and  greater,  its  Nietzsche,  and  even 
such  frank  and  casual  obiter  dicta  as  we  have  in 
Count  von  Buelow's  The  German  Empire,  that 
there  kept  coming  back  upon  my  mind  the  idea 
that  I  had  read  all  this  before,  that  once  before 
positions   of  the   kind  had  been  advanced,  that 

939 


240  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

once  before  Christianity  had  been  rejected  by  the 
great  ones  of  the  earth,  that  once  before  the 
attempt  had  been  made  to  remove  the  Christian 
basis  from  an  entire  Empire,  and  to  revert  to 
what  was  believed  to  be  a  manlier  and  more 
reasonable  foundation ;  and  that  that  attempt 
had  dramatically  failed.  When,  in  one  of  those 
terrifying  German  books, — terrifying  as  a  thing 
is  terrifying  which  reappears  when  we  were  all 
supposing  that  we  were  done  with  it  for  ever, — I 
read  that  the  world-struggle  which  was  imminent 
was,  in  spirit,  a  struggle  between  "  Corsica  and 
Galilee,"  the  phrase  brought  clearly  to  my  mind 
the  parallel  I  had  been  thinking  of. 

I  had  been  thinking  of  "  Julian  the  Apostate." 
That  word  "  Galilee  "  had  brought  back  to  my 
mind  the  fine  story  which  is  really  too  good  not 
to  be  true  :  "  Thou  hast  conquered,  O  Galilean," 
with  which,  if  I  can  order  my  way,  I  shall  con- 
clude. 

This  war  which  is  upon  us  is  too  big  a  thing  to 
have  had  a  merely  local  and  accidental  origin. 
Of  every  great  war  we  may  say  with  St.  Paul 
that  it  is  not  "a  conflict  with  mere  flesh  and 
blood,  but  with  the  despotisms,  the  Empires,  the 
forces  that  control  and  govern  this  dark  world — 


IS  HISTORY  REPEATING  ITSELF?       241 

the  spiritual  hosts  of  evil  arrayed  against  us  in  a 
heavenly  warfare." 

What  terrified  the  Early  Church  in  Julian's 
movement  is  what  sends  the  cold  waves  down 
my  back  as  I  read  the  literature  in  which,  as  it 
appears,  modern  Germany  has  uttered  and  re- 
inforced her  soul.  The  Early  Church  had  had 
experience  of  cruel  emperors  and  of  bad  people 
generally.  But  while  she  was  suffering  contempt 
and  persecution  at  their  hands,  the  Church  could 
comfort  herself  by  two  lines  of  reflection.  For 
one  thing,  she  felt  in  her  soul  that  persecution  and 
the  world's  contempt  were  keeping  the  fire  of  her 
own  faith  clean  and  passionate.  And  for  another 
thing,  she  could  always  say  with  her  Master, 
"Father,  forgive  them,  for  they  know  not  what 
they  do." 

But  face  to  face  with  the  movement  under 
Julian  she  was  deprived  of  these  resources.  For 
Julian  knew  a  great  deal  about  Christianity.  He 
thought  he  knew  everything  about  it,  and  he  did 
know — all  that  an  extremely  able  and  sensitive 
man  may  know  about  something  in  which,  never- 
theless, he  does  not  believe.  It  was,  he  pretended, 
because   he   knew   what   Christianity    was,    and 

because  he  observed  its  influence,  that  he  was  led 
16 


242  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

to  the  rejection  of  it  as  a  private  faith,  or  as  a 
basis  for  society  on  the  large  scale. 

And  again,  his  rejection  of  Christianity  was 
something  altogether  different  from  anything  the 
Church  had  experienced.  Julian  did  not  propose 
to  persecute  Christians.  In  fact,  he  did  not 
propose  to  take  Christianity  seriously.  In  my 
own  view,  a  man  is  not  taking  Christianity 
seriously  who  is  merely  prepared  to  tolerate  it ; 
who  will  even  admit  that  it  is  true  enough  in 
certain  cases,  and  for  certain  people,  but  is  not 
the  truth,  is  not  the  express  will  of  God. 

What  made  Julian's  rejection  of  Christianity  so 
unusual  was,  that  Julian  was  a  sincerely  religious 
man.  His  gods  were  the  old  gods  of  Greece  and 
Rome,  the  symbols  of  strength  and  beauty.  That 
whole  region  in  which  Christianity  moves — 
including  its  ideas  of  sin,  penitence,  forgiveness, 
pity,  the  spiritual  advantage  of  poverty  and  weak- 
ness— all  that  was  obnoxious  to  him.  Had  Julian 
been  a  private  citizen  he  would  probably  have 
done  nothing  more  than  write  some  tracts  against 
the  entire  Christian  scheme — as  indeed  he  did. 
Being  the  brilliant  man  he  was,  and  an  emperor 
to  boot,  the  movement  which  he  inaugurated 
became  so  thorough,  its  principles  received  such 


IS  HISTORY  REPEATING  ITSELF?       243 

prestige  and  outward  expression,  that  the  episode 
of  Julian  forms  one  of  those  recurring  crises  of 
history  in  which  two  formulas  for  life  struggle 
for  the  mastery,  and  one  or  the  other  must  accept 
defeat.  In  the  fourth  century  it  was  Julian  who 
was  overthrown. 

I  take  courage  from  the  sign. 

There  are  two  views  of  history  which  have  had 
their  advocates.  There  is  the  view  that  strong 
personalities  create  events  ;  and  there  is  the  view 
that,  on  the  other  hand,  strong  personalities  are 
themselves  simply  the  expression  of  the  world- 
spirit,  the  ^lan  vital,  the  soul  in  things,  which, 
blindly,  or  with  its  own  intention,  is  for  ever  urging 
its  way.  There  is  something  attractive  in  either 
theory :  the  truth  includes  both.  There  does 
seem  to  be  an  element  of  what  we  call  accident  in 
history — a  man  of  a  certain  type  appearing  at  a 
certain  time  which  gave  him  his  very  stage  and 
opportunity.  And  yet  at  the  same  time,  when 
one  ponders  an  age  deeply,  say  the  age  of 
Napoleon,  or  the  present  crisis,  one  feels  that  for 
a  long  time  forces  had  been  gathering  beneath 
the  surface  which  had  to  find  some  outlet  through 
persons  and  events.  History  is  organic.  There 
is  a  background  and  soil  which  give  the  figures 


244  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

on  the  stage  their  milieu.  Without  that  back- 
ground the  figures  would  be  irrelevant  and  futile. 
Without  those  figures  the  background  would  be 
voiceless  and  featureless,  like  a  dull  sea  or  a  desert 
of  sand. 

It  is  an  absolutely  sound  thing  to  say  that  if 
any  one  element  had  been  different  in  the  age  of 
Julian,  everything  would  have  been  different  If 
the  Christian  Church  of  the  fourth  century  had 
been  more  Christian,  more  unmistakable,  less 
corrupt,  Julian's  movement  would  not  have  been 
called  for.  If  Julian  had  been,  in  the  depths 
of  his  own  soul,  a  Christian,  he  would  have  set 
himself  to  cleanse  the  Augean  stables,  instead 
of  blaming  Christianity  for  the  immoralities,  and 
insincerities,  and  hypocrisies  with  which  he  saw  it 
associated.  As  it  was,  he  saw  Constantius,  his 
uncle,  the  secular  head  of  the  Church,  receiving, 
though  a  murderer,  honours  which  should  be  re- 
served for  saints.  But  there  is  no  end  to  the  "  ifs 
and  ans  "  which  we  can  imagine,  any  one  of  which 
might,  we  suppose,  have  averted  this  particular 
crisis.  Just  as  we  might  speculate,  with  Carlyle, 
as  to  what  course  the  history  of  Europe  would 
have  taken  if  Louis  XVI.  had  not  waited  for  that 
yellow  Berline  in  which  to  escape  from  Paris,  or 


IS  HISTORY  REPEATING  ITSELF?       245 

if  it  had  not  gone  quite  so  slowly,  or  if  a  dissatis- 
fied Frenchman  had  not  happened  to  see  the  face 
of  Louis  through  the  window,  and  gone  ahead  to 
arrange  for  his  apprehension.  Or  what  course 
would  the  history  of  England  and  of  America 
have  taken  if  Oliver  Cromwell  had  sailed  for  New 
England,  as  at  one  time  he  intended? 

Interesting  as  such  speculations  are,  I  feel  that 
we  are  secularising  history  when  we  make  too 
much  of  them.  Behind  all  those  things  which  we 
call  accidental  we  seem  to  be  aware  of  something 
solemn  and  inevitable  which,  had  this  or  that 
failed,  would  have  found  some  other  way  of 
achieving  substantially  the  same  result. 

Take  the  present  crisis.  Whilst  we  must  take 
care  how  we  say  that  war  was  inevitable,  lest 
we  should  be  understood  to  mean  that  we  are 
all  puppets  in  the  hands  of  a  kind  of  Ironical 
Devil,  nevertheless  we  may  say  that,  given  cer- 
tain things  and  certain  persons,  given  Bismarck, 
and  Nietzsche,  and  those  others  whom  I  have 
named,  given  that  these  men  have  dominated 
without  rebuke  the  fluid  spirit  of  a  people,  given 
forty  years  of  increasing  prosperity,  in  which 
their  chosen  principles  seem  never  to  have  failed, 
— and  it  was  inevitable  that  soon  or  late  that 


246  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

people  should  attempt  a  colossal  application  of 
the  spirit  and  policy  which  had  carried  them 
thus  far. 

Julian  challenged  the  nature  and  disposition  of 
things  as  he  had  found  them,  and  in  the  day  of 
his  overthrow  he  discovered  that  Christianity, 
once  operative  in  human  affairs,  remains  for  ever 
a  standard  and  rebuke.  Modern  Germany,  on 
her  own  witness,  is  out  to-day  to  assail  the 
accepted  nature  and  disposition  of  things ;  and 
I  believe  she  also  is  about  to  learn  that  there 
are  words  which,  having  once  been  spoken,  can 
never  be  forgotten,  that  there  are  ideas  which, 
having  for  ages  held  sway  in  the  name  of  God 
over  man's  natural  wildness  and  excess,  cannot 
be  repudiated  without  bringing  on  a  day  of  such 
darkness,  that  it  will  appear  to  be  the  end  of  the 
world,  and  indeed  will  be  the  end  of  man  as  we 
had  come  to  know  man,  and,  on  the  whole,  had 
come  to  love  him. 

Again  and  again,  in  my  reading  of  the  literary 
and  philosophical  work  which  lies  at  the  back  of 
German  political  action,  I  have  had  the  same 
feeling  as  I  am  conscious  of  in  reading  about 
Julian.  Again  and  again  I  find  myself  in  entire 
agreement   with    charges   which    Germany    and 


IS  HISTORY  REPEATING  ITSELF?       247 

Julian  alike  make  against  things  as  they  are. 
Julian  hated  the  slovenliness  and  want  of  erect- 
ness  and  thoroughness  amongst  Christians,  just 
as  Germany  hates  and  despises  the  sentimentalism 
and  social  indolence  of  all  nations  not  Teutonic. 
Both  Germany  and  Julian  associate  this  indolence 
and  effeminacy  with  Christianity  as  popularly 
understood.  Therefore,  in  the  case  of  both,  their 
polemic  against  Christianity  has  long  since  got 
beyond  the  denial  of  the  metaphysical  doctrines 
of  the  faith,  and  beyond  the  denial  of  the  claims 
of  the  personalities  of  the  faith.  They  have  both 
moved  right  on  to  the  rejection  of  the  ethic  and 
personal  habit  of  Christianity,  as  being  contrary 
to  reason  and  unequal  to  the  demands  of  life. 

Now,  with  much  of  this  criticism  we  should  all 
do  well  to  agree,  even  though  we  are  aware  that 
it  is  based  upon  a  misunderstanding  of  true 
Christianity.  In  fact,  the  mistake  which  Julian 
made,  and  which  representative  writers  of  Ger- 
many have  made,  is  the  commonplace  mistake 
of  refusing  Christianity  because  of  the  low  level 
in  moral  energy  of  an  enormous  number  of  people 
who  profess  it.  Their  reasoning  is  not  so  crudely 
expressed  as  this,  but  essentially  it  is  not  different, 
— that,  since  the  Latin  races,  let  us  say,  are  easy- 


248  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

going,  sentimental,  lazy,  not  very  clean,  all  this  is 
due  to  their  traditional  piety,  which  encourages 
such  ways  of  living,  which  certainly  does  not 
rebuke  such  ways  of  living.  Our  proper  attitude 
towards  such  a  criticism,  if  we  are  wise,  is  not  to 
say  there  is  nothing  in  it,  but  to  admit  that  there 
is  a  great  deal  in  it ;  thereupon  we  ought  to  show, 
by  the  way  we  address  ourselves  to  the  removal  of 
unworthy  features,  that  these  unworthy  features 
are  not  due  lo  our  Christianity,  but  survive,  in 
spite  of  our  Christianity,  the  not  yet  transformed 
qualities  of  our  hereditary  human  nature. 

For  example, — and  these  are  the  matters  to 
which  we  shall  attend  when  this  war  is  over, — 
it  is  a  shocking  fact  that  there  should  be  such 
poverty  and  squalor  in  a  land  like  our  own,  in 
which,  to  say  no  more,  the  religion  of  Jesus,  with 
its  demand  for  justice  as  well  as  for  pity,  is  the 
acknowledged  religion  of  the  State.  But  to  reject 
Christianity  because  of  those  very  things  from 
which  Christ  came  into  the  world  to  deliver  us, 
is  on  a  level  with  rejecting  a  gold  currency  be- 
cause there  are  in  circulation  many  counterfeit 
coins. 

Julian  and  these  German  philosophers  charge 
Christianity  with  ministering  to  certain  undesir- 


IS  HISTORY  REPEATING  ITSELF?      249 

able  human  instincts,  and  with  undermining  the 
strength  and  hardihood  of  people.  Well,  we 
must  not  be  astonished.  George  Eliot,  once 
upon  a  time,  said  that  the  ethics  of  Jesus  were 
effeminate  ;  and  this  although  the  symbol  of  Chris- 
tianity is  a  cross ;  and  although  Jesus  declared 
more  than  once  that  in  order  to  follow  His  way, 
it  would  take  as  much  out  of  a  man  as  it  does  to 
cut  off  your  left  hand  with  your  right ;  that  you 
might  be  compelled  to  pluck  out  your  own  eye 
rather  than  go  one  step  further  on  your  way  once 
known  to  be  wrong. 

The  fact  is,  it  may  not  be,  and  it  is  not,  Christ 
that  these  men  impugn,  but  the  more-than-half 
worldly  and  accommodating  and  unreal  thing 
which  has  been  allowed  to  take  the  name  of 
Christianity.  It  ought  never  to  be  possible,  as 
it  was  in  Julian's  day,  and  as  it  must  be  in  our 
day,  —  otherwise  the  thing  would  not  have 
occurred, — to  criticise  Christianity  in  the  name 
of  a  higher  and  more  wholesome  way  of  living. 
And  the  answer  to  all  such  criticism  is,  not  to 
write  a  book  in  defence  of  Christian  doctrine,  or 
of  Christian  ethics  in  the  abstract,  but  to  manifest 
a  life  in  ourselves,  and  as  Christians  to  organise 
such  a  life  of  health  and  moral  energy  in  the 


2 so  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

State,   that  such  criticisms  shall  fail  because  of 
their  sheer  unreality  and  irrelevance. 

The  truth  is, — ^as  every  serious  student  of  his- 
tory has  confessed,  including  the  devout  Catholic, 
Dante, — when  Constantine  made  Christianity  the 
religion  of  the  State,  he  almost  extinguished  it. 
Constantine,  whom  it  takes  a  singular  want  of 
humour  to  consider  a  Christian  at  all,  issued  the 
edict  making  Christianity  the  religion  of  Rome, 
in  306.  Julian  became  Emperor  of  Rome  in  361. 
And  in  that  interval  of  fifty  years  Christianity 
had  simply  touched  bottom.  Constantine,  wish- 
ing to  use  the  Church  for  his  own  purposes,  to 
make  it  an  instrument  of  power,  gave  it  wealth 
and  privileges,  thus  radically  transforming  it. 
"It  was  no  longer  that  religious  brotherhood, 
composed  of  poor  and  humble  people,  often  per- 
secuted, without  worldly  influence,  and  content 
with  the  simple  worship  celebrated  in  obscure  and 
private  dwellings.  Triumphant  Christianity  felt 
the  need  of  imposing  itself  on  the  multitude  by 
means  of  a  luxury  that  attracts,  and  legends  that 
strengthen  the  faith.  In  its  evolution  it  profited 
by  the  spirit  of  the  times  ;  in  contact  with  pagan- 
ism it  became  worldly,  and  acquired  many  pagan 
habits.     Hence  the   pomp,   the  luxury,  and  the 


IS  HISTORY  REPEATING  ITSELF?       251 

numerous  hierarchies  that  were  prevalent  in  the 
fourth  century.  The  liturgy  was  developed,  and 
by  means  of  the  councils  dogmas  were  formulated 
and  defended  with  the  greatest  ardour.  The  life 
of  the  clergy  and  the  bishops  no  longer  resembled 
that  of  the  primitive  Church.  It  became  corrupt 
and  luxurious.  Ammianus  describes  the  bishops  of 
the  cities,  who,  'enriched  by  the  gifts  of  the  matrons, 
drove  around  the  streets,  seated  in  coaches  ;  splen- 
didly attired,  and  lovers  of  abundant  banquets, 
surpassing  those  of  the  Imperial  table.' 

'*  As  long  as  Christianity  was  compelled  to  use 
all  the  strength  of  a  minority  in  resisting  persecu- 
tion, it  was  a  powerful  moral  force  with  men  and 
developed  in  them  sentiments  of  heroic  virtue. 
But  Christianity,  when  victorious,  rested  quietly 
in  security  and  peace,  leaving  man  free  to  return 
to  the  indulgence  of  his  passions  and  to  devote  to  / 

evil  all  the  energies  that  were  no  longer  engaged 
in  the  supreme  combat." 

It  may  be  wrong  in  reason  for  Germany,  as 
for  Julian,  to  attribute  to  Christianity  vices  which 
are  indeed  contradicted  by  Christianity ;  but  the 
proper  answer  is  not  to  dispute  such  logic,  but 
to  remove  such  facts. 

What  I  mean  by  much  that  has  gone  before, 


252  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

from  which  I  now  pass,  is  simply  this,  that  if 
Christianity  had  been  more  vital,  more  real,  more 
obviously  mastering  the  minds  of  men,  Julian  the 
Apostate  would  have  had  no  case,  and  the  char- 
acteristic teaching  of  Germany,  which  has  found 
its  occasion  in  this  European  crisis,  would  never 
have  found  a  hearing.  It  is  thus  that  we  are  all 
to  blame.  We  have  all  of  us  in  various  ways 
allowed  men  to  misunderstand  Christianity. 
Christianity  does  not  make  men  prostrate.  It 
offers  to  men  who  acknowledge  themselves 
prostrate  a  basis  on  which  to  recover  their  self- 
respect.  Christianity  is  a  faith  for  the  poor  and 
the  defeated,  for  the  halt  and  maimed  and  blind. 
But  its  whole  object  is  to  make  men  of  us  all, 
to  give  us  the  victory  over  disabling  things,  to 
make  the  blind  see,  and  to  restore  the  lame  to 
the  ranks.  It  is  a  charge  against  Christianity 
which  can  quote  many  things  in  its  support,  that 
it  has  been  construed  as  encouraging  blindness 
for  the  sake  of  blindness,  and  poverty  for  the 
sake  of  poverty,  and  a  suffused  incompetence  and 
imbecility  as  though  these  were  the  marks  of  the 
children  of  God. 

But  to   proceed,  let   me   say  something  more 
definite  of  Julian,  who,  after  all,  is  my  subject, 


IS  HISTORY  REPEATING  ITSELF?       253 

though  I  have  confessed  that  I  chose  him  on  a 
pretext.  He  was  born  in  the  year  331  of  our 
era.  Constantine,  called  the  Great,  who  almost 
ruined  Christianity  by  making  it  the  religion  of 
the  State,  was  his  uncle.  This  gave  Christianity 
a  bad  chance  with  the  young  man  Julian.  We 
all  of  us  begin  by  taking  our  ideas  of  religion 
from  one  or  two  people  whom  we  happen  to 
know  very  well.  It  is  therefore  not  to  be 
wondered  at  that  Julian  suffered  all  his  life  from 
a  perverse  and  uncomprehending  attitude  towards 
the  Christian  religion.  The  next  Emperor, 
Constantius,  was  no  better  than  Constantine. 
Constantius  murdered  Julian's  mother.  You 
cannot  be  astonished,  therefore,  that  from  the 
dawning  of  his  intelligence  Julian  was  disposed 
to  think  the  worst  of  Christianity.  Indeed,  just 
as  in  the  course  of  a  long  reading  on  Nietzsche 
I  cannot  recall  his  ever  having  met  a  truly  good 
and  able  Christian  man,  but  only  Christian 
courtiers  and  worldly-wise  men,  neither  can  I 
recall  any  hearty  and  fine  friendship  that  Julian 
ever  had  with  an  able  and  good  man,  who  was 
at  the  same  time  a  Christian.  Both  Nietzsche 
and  Julian  judged  of  Christianity  by  some 
wretched  examples  of  men. 


2  54  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

Julian  was  a  child  of  genius.  Even  the 
accounts  of  him  which  we  have  from  Gregory  of 
Nazianzus,  who  was  his  exact  contemporary, 
cannot  conceal  the  Emperor's  eminent  and  un- 
usual qualities.  He  was  nervous,  restless,  many- 
sided  ;  a  great  soldier,  who,  in  a  brilliant 
campaign,  overcame  the  Gauls,  against  whom 
Constantius  had  sent  him  in  the  hope  that  there 
he  would  find  a  grave.  But  far  from  that,  the 
Gauls,  whom  Julian  overcame,  rallied  to  his 
standard,  proclaimed  him  Emperor,  and  fought 
under  his  eye  from  that  day  until  the  day  when, 
in  the  retreat  from  Ctesiphon,  he  fell  under  the 
javelin  of  a  Persian.  It  is  said  that  so  resourceful 
and  various  was  Julian,  that  he  could  at  one 
moment  write  a  report,  dictate  another,  and  listen 
to  a  third.  He  was  a  poet,  a  writer  of  essays,  a 
priest  of  the  gods,  deeply  versed  in  the  occult. 
We  have  an  account  of  him  from  Gregory,  pre- 
judiced indeed,  but  full  of  insight.  It  was 
written  after  the  death  of  Julian,  and  when  the 
Empire,  which  for  a  short  time  had  withdrawn  its 
public  support  from  the  Church,  had  returned  to 
the  ordinance  of  Constantine. 

**  I    was    not    favourably   impressed  with   the 
jerking  motion  of  his  neck,"  says  Gregory,  **  the 


IS  HISTORY  REPEATING  ITSELF?       255 

shifting  shoulders,  the  roaming  eyes,  that  turned 
from  one  side  to  another,  having  in  them  some- 
thing of  the  maniac ;  the  unsteady  shaking  feet, 
which  seemed  unable  to  support  his  weight,  his 
nostrils  dilated  with  pride  and  disdain,  the  linea- 
ments of  the  face  ridiculous  and  conceited,  the 
immoderate  and  sudden  laugh ;  the  gestures  of 
assent  and  dissent  without  reason ;  questions 
confused  and  irrelevant,  the  answers  no  better, 
intermingling  the  one  with  the  other,  without 
order  or  reason." 

But  that,  I  repeat,  is  the  report  of  a  good  but 
properly  prejudiced  man.  In  any  case,  Julian 
died  at  thirty-two :  so  we  must  be  charitable. 
Men  of  genius  who  die  at  thirty-two  are  not 
to  be  estimated  by  the  headlines  of  copy-books. 
He  was  Emperor  for  only  two  years,  and  in 
that  time,  to  say  no  more,  he  marched  at  the 
head  of  conquering  armies  from  France  to 
Persia. 

The  hostility  to  Christianity  which,  until  he 
ascended  the  throne,  he  concealed,  went  on 
deepening  thereafter  until  the  end.  It  is  difficult 
to  see  how  a  man  of  Julian's  ability  could  be  so 
unfair,  so  blind  to  the  idealism  of  Christianity,  so 
unable  or  unwilling  to  discriminate  between  the 


256  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

hypocrisies  which  throve  in  a  Church  because  it 
was  fashionable  and  worldly,  and  the  essence  of 
the  whole  matter,  which  he  might  have  found 
by  a  study  of  the  Gospels.  He  was  able  enough 
and  philosophic  enough  to  discriminate  between 
the  pure  ideas  underlying  the  stories  of  the  gods 
and  those  stories  themselves.  And  yet  I  cannot 
find  in  Julian  even  one  sentence  in  which  he 
lashes  professing  Christians  for  their  disloyalty 
to  their  own  master, — such,  for  example,  as  I 
recall  in  the  noble  and  pathetic  words  of  Nietzsche : 
"  There  has  been  only  one  Christian  in  this  world, 
and  He  died  on  Calvary." 

The  fact  is,  there  is  a  type  of  mind  which 
becomes  positively  furious  at  the  whole  body  of 
Christian  ideas.  W.  E.  Henley,  in  our  own  day, 
seems  to  me  to  have  had  the  kind  of  mind  I 
mean.  They  cannot,  or  will  not, — it  is  the  same, 
— see  anything  except  a  wretched  cringing  and 
cowardice  in  the  cry  for  forgiveness.  And  any- 
one who  confesses  to  this  particular  need  becomes 
to  them,  there  and  then,  almost  nauseous,  as 
Robert  Louis  Stevenson  became  to  Henley. 
They  cannot  understand  that  in  seeking  forgive- 
ness from  God,  a  man,  far  from  running  away 
from  the  consequences  of  his  actions,  is  trying  to 


IS  HISTORY  REPEATING  ITSELF?       257 

face  them,  to  stand  up  to  them.  He  is  not  asking 
God  to  let  him  off.  He  is  asking  God  to  punish 
him  if  He  will  and  as  He  will,  but  not  to  cast  him 
away.  The  cry  for  forgiveness  is  really  a  cry  for 
life,  for  energy  to  make  amends  so  far  as  is  pos- 
sible for  the  folly  of  former  days. 

Poor  Julian  was  to  learn  that  even  Christians 
had  not  a  monopoly  of  vice  and  hypocrisy.  He 
became  lonelier  as  he  went  forward.  He  began, 
as  lonely  people  will  unless  they  are  on  guard 
over  themselves,  to  be  superstitious.  He  culti- 
vated soothsayers.  In  fact,  he  did  for  Paganism 
what  Constantine  did  for  Christianity — he  estab- 
lished it.  And  soon  all  the  low  creatures  who 
had  come  in  with  Christianity  when  it  became  a 
safe  and  profitable  thing  began  to  pour  in  with 
Paganism,  now  restored  to  favour. 

There  is  probably  always  a  touch  of  madness 
in  genius  ;  and  genius  in  an  emperor  is  almost 
sure — for  want  of  criticism  and  the  kindly  rebuke 
of  friends — to  lead  on  to  something  unsafe. 

Julian  began  to  have  an  obsession  that  he  was 
the  Messiah.  He  believed  that  he  was  a  vessel 
chosen  by  the  gods.  He  declared  that  he  was 
guarded  continually  by  a  host  of  angels.  It  was 
for  this  reason  that  on  his  last  battlefield  he 
17 


258  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

refused  a  breastplate,  and  the  javelin  of  a  Persian 
buried  itself  in  his  side. 

Before  the  end  his  bitterness  against  the 
Christians  became  a  disorder  of  the  mind.  He 
boasted  to  an  ecclesiastic  that,  on  the  termination 
of  the  war,  he  would  treat  the  Christians  with  so 
much  severity  that  the  Son  of  the  Carpenter 
would  be  unable  to  aid  them ;  whereupon  the 
ecclesiastic  rejoined  that  the  Son  of  the  Carpenter 
was  at  that  very  moment  preparing  him  a  coffin — 
a  story  which  shows  two  things  :  first,  that  Julian 
was  becoming  excited  and  even  unworthy  of  him- 
self;  and  second,  that  his  hostility  to  the  Church 
was  already  beginning  to  separate  in  the  Church 
the  dross  from  the  gold,  and  to  bring  out  brave 
men.  The  moment  the  Church  was  dethroned  it 
began  again  to  mount  its  proper  throne.  The 
Arian  gang  went  out,  with  their  enlightenment 
and  their  vague  theology.  The  Athanasians,  by 
their  virtue  and  qualities  of  character,  had  become 
the  leaders.  And  the  Church,  like  Peter  after  his 
lapse,  had  recovered  her  great  way  of  speaking : 
*' We  must  obey  God  rather  than  men." 

The  career  of  Julian  has  more  than  once,  even 
in  our  day,  attracted  the  minds  of  thoughtful 
men.     To  men  who  have  an   eye   for  the  play 


IS  HISTORY  REPEATING  ITSELF?       259 

of  principles  in  history  it  will  always  have 
a  fascination.  Merejkowsky  and  Ibsen  have 
pondered  Julian.  Curiously  enough  it  was  the 
proclamation  of  the  German  Emperor  in  Versailles 
in  1 87 1  which  set  Ibsen  thinking  of  Julian.  Did 
Ibsen  foresee  that  Germany,  which  had  committed 
itself  to  certain  principles,  would  encounter  a 
hostility  in  the  nature  of  things  ?  Nothing  is 
impossible  to  genius.  At  any  rate,  here  is  the 
story  of  Julian's  end. 

It  is  a  great  saying  that  he  who  takes  the 
sword  shall  perish  by  the  sword.  Every  victory 
which  Julian  gained  seemed  to  lead  on  to  another 
war.  At  last  he  invaded  Persia.  With  infinite 
pains  he  transported  a  great  army  across  the 
Tigris  to  the  very  walls  of  Ctesiphon.  There 
the  tide  of  prosperity  failed  with  that  awful 
unmistakableness  which  a  dramatist  loves  to 
detect.  The  Persians  would  never  come  to  a 
decisive  battle.  They  hung  upon  the  Roman 
flanks  as  old  Kutuzow  hung  upon  the  flanks  of 
Napoleon  in  that  terrible  retreat.  Everything 
happened  amiss,  as  when  the  waters  came  back 
upon  the  Egyptians,  so  that  their  chariots  drave 
heavily,  and  God  looked  at  them  from  the  edge 
of  a  cloud. 


26o  ANCESTRAL  VOICES 

At  last  a  battle  was  offered  and  accepted. 
Julian,  ever  brave,  and  now  recklessly  brave, 
rushed  into  the  midst  of  it.  It  was  then  that  a 
javelin,  flung  pointedly  at  him,  grazed  his  arm  and 
lodged  in  his  liver.  He  tried  to  pull  it  out  with  his 
naked  hands,  but  it  cut  them.  Ibsen  tells  us  that 
the  javelin  which  slew  Julian  was  the  very  spear 
with  which  the  Roman  soldier  had  pierced  the 
side  of  Jesus  as  He  hung  upon  the  Cross.  In 
any  case,  as  a  fact  in  symbolism,  Julian  was  slain 
by  an  instrument  which  had  been  dipped  in  the 
blood  of  Christ.  As  he  lay  dying  he  delivered 
a  beautiful  message  to  his  henchmen.  And  as 
he  died  he  seemed  to  see  something  in  front  of 
him,  just  overhead,  to  which,  according  to  the 
record,  he  spoke  with  his  last  breath,  saying, 
"  Thou  hast  conquered,  O  Galilean." 

There  is  something  which  is  not  to  be  set  aside 
in  this  recurring  confession,  "Thou  hast  con- 
quered, O  Galilean,"  for  it  has  the  support  of 
history.  It  is  simply  the  fact  that  wherever 
enmity  to  Christ  has  become  organised,  and  has 
proceeded  to  act  strongly  upon  its  own  principles, 
wherever,  in  short,  the  attempt  has  been  made  to 
dethrone  Christianity,  it  has  failed.  All  sorts 
of    things    are    forgiven    to    nations,    as   Christ 


IS  HISTORY  REPEATING  ITSELF?       261 

promised  they  should  be — all  sorts  of  hypocrisies 
and  treacheries  even.  But  the  sin  against  the 
Holy  Ghost,  the  denial  of  the  spirit  and  mental 
type  of  Christianity,  the  reasoned  repudiation  of 
Christianity  as  the  way  and  the  truth  and  the  life, 
the  reversion  to  the  pre-Christian  and  diabolical 
view  of  man's  nature — that,  on  the  evidence  of 
history,  has  not  been  forgiven  a  people. 

A  nation  which  acts  upon  a  reasoned  rejection 
of  the  Christian  way  may  not  immediately  be 
overwhelmed  by  contrary  events ;  but  in  the 
depth  of  its  soul  it  comes  to  perceive  something 
which  chills  its  heart  and  paralyses  its  arm. 


EPILOGUE 

IN  the  heart  of  Paris,  in  the  Pantheon,  and  on 
the  spot  where  in  the  old  days  stood  the 
steps  towards  the  altar,  in  the  very  place  where 
transepts,  nave,  and  chancel  converge,  where  the 
lights  from  all  quarters  meet  and  blend,  there  has 
been  erected  In  our  day  a  group  in  plaster  (one 
day  to  be  marble),  which,  because  of  its  dignity 
and  seriousness,  because  of  its  background  of 
something  sublime,  pathetic,  indestructible,  might 
itself  have  signified  to  the  world  that  France  was 
risen  into  newness  of  life. 

On  an  immense  white  block  stands  the  noble 
figure  of  a  woman.  On  one  side  of  her  throng 
the  spokesmen  of  the  Revolution,  their  hands 
outstretched,  passionate,  threatening.  On  the 
other  side,  the  soldiers  of  the  Revolution,  horse 
and  foot,  with  fife  and  drum  march  out  to  war — 
the  happy  instruments  of  an  unquestioned,  un- 
suspected will.     But  it  is  the  central  Figure  which 

controls  everything,  subduing  to  its  own  gravity 

262 


EPILOGUE  263 

the  thought  and  speech  and  action  on  this  side 
and  that.  It  is  the  figure  of  a  woman.  Her 
right  hand  leans  upon  a  sword-hilt,  the  point  of 
which  rests  upon  the  ground.  With  her  left  hand 
she  holds  in  place  the  "  securis  cum  fascibus  " — the 
symbol  of  justice.  It  is  the  free  spirit  of  the 
Nation ;  it  is  the  general  mind ;  it  is  Liberty. 
But  it  is  Liberty  aware  now  of  her  awful  task. 
Unlike  the  eyes  of  her  sister  in  the  harbour  of 
New  York,  which  have  the  valour  of  ignorance, 
this  one's  eyes  are  on  the  ground.  Here  is 
Liberty — white,  sober,  anxious.  Here  is  Liberty 
after  a  hundred  years ;  with  her  eyes  upon  the 
ground,  musing,  aware  of  something  missing, 
preparing  her  soul — so  my  mind  wandered  as  I 
considered  her — to  return  to  some  still-remem- 
bered loyalty,  to  go  back,  say  rather,  to  go 
forward,  to  the  shelter  and  security  of  something- 
wiser  than  liberty  :  I  mean.  Faith. 


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